We have a Tandberg T24 tape device to handle all of our long term backups right now. We decided that we're not backing up nearly everything that we would like to and that we still have a lot of vulnerabilities. To get to where we want to be, we're going to have to back up a lot more servers than we're currently doing. All of our internal servers have some sort of directly attached drive (I.e. LaCie Raid box or a simple portable hard drive) doing backups, but what we want to do is get those backups off-site. The current tape drive is directly attached via SCSI to a Windows Server 2008 File Server. So to back up anything to tape, it has to be funneled through the File Server. With the current increase that we have planned, I don't think that funneling everything through the File Server is the right course of action and I'm thinking that maybe a second backup device would be more appropriate.

I would like your input on a couple of ideas.

1) Doing HDD instead of tape. Tape is hard to deal with. We have a regular rotation cycle, so they don't need years and years of shelf life, so I'm wondering if something HDD-based would be better.

2) Something accessible over the network. Instead of having the device directly attached to one specific machine, have it available to all the servers over the network. Our File Server is a 12-disk raid 6 set up.. I was thinking something like that, but with no raid involved, all disks are stand alone so they can be used/installed/removed on an individual basis. Does any such thing exist?

Thanks for your ideas. I'm really interested to hear about some of the solutions you guys are using..