We have a FAS2552 that contains all our data and VM's. The servers are about 1TB, and CIFS shares are about 9TB. We are using a Unitrends appliance that is up for renewal, and is getting maxed out on space. Unitrends wants to sell a larger appliance, about 26TB (current box is 13TB usable), but may be cost prohibitive.
Our backup needs include:
-Offsite daily, via cloud or disk (currently do full backups on weekends, archive to disk; weekdays differentials and incrementals archived to disk)
-Rotating Monthly/quarterly/annual backups offsite. Keep annuals forever.
-We mainly use the backups for DR, as the Netapp previous versions and snapshots work very well.
I know what Unitrends is offering, but wondering about other options:
-Purchasing some software and building my own storage (Storageworks said they could not do Netapp CIFS shares, but we could set up a file server, attach the shares and backup from there - seems cumbersome to me; Veeam is supposed to have the ability to backup CIFS shares in the next version?)
-Use a 2nd NetApp for Vaulting and Mirroring - either purchase a 2nd appliance and install at a remote office, or my NetApp service provider has a cloud package I could mirror to. I would still need to do some backups to disk for permanent archives.
Budget wise, hoping to find something for under $25k.
Unitrends does NOT do incremental forevers on the CIFS, which is annoying - would love to have that feature.
Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
