One of the great things I like about our backup infrastructure is how we can add extra storage without the need of shutting down the service. It can be scaled to what we need and when we need it without interrupting any of our customer’s backups.
I’ve recently dealt with the daunting task (or so I first thought) of adding a lot of extra storage space for our backup service, a mission critical service that our customers heavily rely on for their disaster recovery. Fortunately it wasn’t a case of shutting down the servers, slapping in a few hard drives into our SAN and starting the server’s again, leaving a risk of customers experiencing downtime with their data backups.
Thankfully, because we replicate backups across 3 different storage systems we have the ability to bring down one system without interrupting customer backups. Once one system is offline the extra storage was added and merged into the existing space, a procedure that took hours to complete. Once completed the system was brought back online and started to automatically receive replicated data from the other two systems. This procedure was repeated on the 2nd system and then the 3rd.
We completed a full upgrade to our storage vaults over a week period and within this time-frame we never missed a single customer’s backup.
You gotta love data replication!
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