Hello William,

If you were to get a new Powervault 124T it would most likely be an LTO4, LTO5 or LTO6 which for all of those they use a SAS connection instead of SCSI.  Now with that being said you can have it backup your 2 new file shares as well depending on your backup software you may need to get a license for a remote agent so the data can be backed up.  

Now as for doing network backup of your 2 new file share servers you will need to look at your backup software to confirm that it supports it (which most do).  What you will also need to look at is what is the current speed of your network & is adding a backup over the network can slow down the overall performance of the network a little bit if running on a slower network.  A 500gb back can finish in an hour depending on what types of files make up the 500GB of data.  for example if you have 500GB of word docs that can be backup over a network within about 1 hour, but if you were backicking up 500GB of exchange data that can take longer than 1 hour.  I would say for that you will need to do some testing to see which way is going to work the best for you.  

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Hello Sam,

Thanks for your information!

We use Symantec backup Exec 11d in the exchange server to backup files to Powervault 124T. We probably have to use new software since we have two more file servers.

Most 1.8T files in the file servers are office files like pdf, word, excel, powerpoint, pictures, etc. We used Gigabit Ethernet. I will do a test and see the backup speed. We will run the backup during midnight, so I think the degraded network performance is fine.

And the data is about 2T, including 250G Exchange email database. Others are daily office files. I hope I can full backup the email (250G) everyday like before. And full backup other data files (1.7T) weekly and have differentiated backup daily.  I want a backup of at least one month. 2-3 months or even longer would be optimum.

You mentioned the new one will be SAS connection. Will my old Exchange server be compatible with the new Powervault 124T? It's a poweredge 2950 and the model number is Removed by moderator.

William

Hello William,

So with your PE2950 it depends on which riser card that you have in your server as to if it will support a SAS card for a newer PV124T.  The SAS card that is recommended for the PV124T is a 6GB SAS card which requires an 8X PCIe slot.  Now as long as you have an open 8X slot on your Riser card in your PE2950 then if you were to get a newer PV124T with SAS connections it should work.  

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Hello Sam,

Thanks. I will think about which solution works best for us.

William