Irish Lights Data and Server Backup Solution

Tender description

Irish Lights currently has backup servers in two locations – Dun Laoghaire and ILV Granuaile (Ship) Dun Laoghaire Irish Lights has a VMware, vCenter managed, server infrastructure with key data and Virtual Machines stored on an on-premise SAN. There are a small number of physical servers with a small amount of data that requiring back up. The standard daily/weekly/monthly backups are carried out by Arcserve Backup on a physical server with an end-of-life tape drive (LTO 5/6) attached. The VMware infrastructure comprises of 3 hosts with 2 physical processors in each. There are currently approximately 40 Virtual Machines across these 3 hosts. Data from selected files/folders on the Windows servers (VM and physical) is backed up across the IP network to the tape drive. Current, full backup of data at weekend is 3.3 Tb • Files on various file shares (on-premise) 2.5 Tb • MS Exchange (on-premise) 250 Gb • MS SQL Server backups (on-premise) 400 Gb Please see Appendix A for more detailed information on server sizes. Nightly differential backup increases from ~ 500 Gb to 800 Gb during the week. It should be noted that this includes full backups of SQL Server data and Exchange databases each night. Periodically, and manually, vRanger is used to backup whole VMs to a standalone NAS. This is usually in conjunction with application of Microsoft security patches to servers. Full server backups are taken, patches applied and servers tested. If a patch causes a problem, the server can be rolled back to the pre-patch state. These vRanger backups are manually backed up to tape and stored off-site. The VMware infrastructure will be used to host machines on different internal networks. Irish Lights Ship ILV Granuaile has a physical server for authentication and local storage of documents, photos and videos. The network has dual connectivity to the Internet. Please see Appendix A Specification for more details.