[Discuss] Revisiting VMWare ESX backup options

[Richard Pieri]

On 10/29/2014 2:54 PM, Nathan Burridge wrote:
> Have you looked into VMWare's Data Protection which is offered for free?

Yeah... and I dismissed it based on the outright lies that make up the 
ad copy:

"Traditional data backup and data recovery solutions are expensive, slow 
and complex."

Fallacy 1: Expensive. No, they're not. A 16-slot rack-mount library 
costs around $4K. Most of that is the drive itself; the loader mechanism 
is cheap. LTO-6 cartridge prices have dropped to about $50 each in bulk. 
That times 16 is $800 for each ~100TB of storage capacity.

Fallacy 2: Slow. No. "Slow" isn't an absolute; it's relative to 
something else. Certainly, magtape is slower than most rotating platter 
media but that's irrelevant. It's part of a backup system. It doesn't 
need to be the fastest thing going. It needs to be reliable and the 
backup history depth needs to be scalable.

Fallacy 3: Complex. This is all about horizontal scale. TSM is a complex 
system but it needs to be in order to handle literally thousands of 
simultaneous backup clients. A simple tape deck attached to a small 
database server is no more complex than the shell script that freezes 
the database, dumps it to disk, thaws the database, and writes the dump 
to tape.

-- 
Rich P.