From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

What type of hardware should be used in a backup solution?

From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

What type of hardware should be used in a backup solution?

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- Many years ago, backup programs were mainly configured to use a backup tape. Tape was a great invention because it was compact and held a lot of data. You could easily back up most servers on it up to around 2005. One of the downsides was that tape couldn't keep up with storage growth, and the data was in one straight line. A regular hard drive on a spindle can retrieve data faster on a circle using a roving arm to pick up the data. A single line of data means that if the file you want to retrieve is at the end of the tape, it will be a long restoration process. Today, we have evolved past backup tape. For a short period, some admins were backing up to Blu-ray and HD DVD, but those two were eclipsed by the rise of cheap storage. Hard drives as high as 16 terabytes in a single drive can be purchased now for under $300. You can connect a large drive using a USB enclosure, and back up directly to it from the server. If speed is more important, you can swap out traditional spindle drives with Solid-State Drives, also known as SSDs. These cost more, but they're also getting cheaper each year. You can pair drives together in a RAID format with redundancy for very little money, into a network attached storage unit, or NAS. A NAS unit is connected by an ethernet cable, or is wireless and contains a lot of file storage. You connect to it using TCP/ IP. It typically has a Linux operating system on it, and you can have local users or use LDAP to connect to active directory for authentication and authorization. You can access most NAS devices by either a website or using command line or secure show. Although a NAS holds a lot of data and is easily accessible, it is fairly slow. That makes it fine for file storage and storage for backups. Although, file restorations may be a bit slower than most people would like. Another great option would be a Storage Area Network Device, or a SAN. A SAN usually connects by either fiber or ethernet. It also has a web-accessed operating system, where you can set up permissions and encrypt the data stream if needed. A SAN is the most expensive option, but it's also the fastest and most reliable. You can usually buy a SAN with redundant drives, power, fans, and controllers. You can also use a window server and install the iSCI target role and make it a SAN as well for much less money. You can make a byte for byte copy from one SAN to another. SANs and NAS units can be in other geographical locations if needed. This last but upcoming popular storage option is Cloud Storage. You can use a Cloud application and storage, or an on-premises backup server that backs up to Cloud Storage. This can be more expensive than a SAN, depending on how many copies of data you keep before overriding. So be sure to keep track of your costs as backup copies are added. Restoration is going to be slower than any option, however. It can take days or weeks to restore data, depending on your internet speed and the amount of data to restore. Backup storage has changed over the years for the better. The costs keep going down and the speed keeps getting faster.

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