Breece Hill BizGuardian

In the busy world of the IT operator, two tasks take precedence over all - backup and restore. Given the amount of data that now resides on servers, desktops and laptops and the increased hours of operation, the backup window is getting ever smaller. Despite increases in tape speed and capacity, many organisations struggle to backup their data without impacting the working day.

One solution that has become popular is Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T) appliances. These use a rule based approach to site data on different tiers of storage. The more important the data, the faster it is to access. Eventually, data is migrated off to tape. Not all organisations or departments need several tiers of disk. Simply being able to dump backups to a hard disk which is allied to the tape device is sufficient.

Enter the BizGuardian from Breece Hill.

The BizGuardian comes in a large box with everything already installed into the appliance. There is an accessories box with quick start installation and configuration guides, three power leads, network cables, four LTO 3 tapes capable of storing up to 800GB each, drivers for the various hardware components and the Windows Server 2003 disks and manual. Mounting brackets for installing the BizGuardian into the rack are also supplied although the mounting rails are already attached to the chassis.

Missing from the CD and documentation sets were the EMC manuals and software for Retrospect although there is a section in the Configuration Guide on how to install EMC Retrospect clients. A separate CD included as part of the quick installation guide has a number of general documents and the EMC Retrospect clients but not the Retrospect manuals.

Open the chassis and you find a server with a built in tape system complete with autoloader. An Intel motherboard with a Pentium 4 processor, dual core, 3GHz processor, 2GB RAM which can be extended to 16GB, two built in network ports - 1 x 10/100 and 1 x 10/100/1000, video, keyboard, mouse ports and 3 USB ports. This is a good specification for a server and you could configure it as a Disaster Recovery server to run virtual machines.

Storage is via eight SATA drives and in the model reviewed, these were 250GB. Breece Hill has qualified 500GB drives and is in the process of qualifying even higher capacity drives. The drives are managed by a Broadcom RAIDCORE PCI-X 64-bit card. As the primary purpose of this device is backup, the disk drives are installed at the rear of the chassis.

There is a CD drive for software installation and this is also access from the rear of the BizGuardian.

The tape device is a 10-slot LTO 3 drive with autoloader. This is driven by an Adaptec AIC-7901 SCSI card. While the card is a 64-bit PCI-X card it came installed in a 32-bit slot.

The BizGuardian comes fully assembled with the exception of the tape cartridges. This makes it an extremely cumbersome box to manoeuvre and install. Storage appliances are generally heavy today and this is the first I've seen for some time where everything is already installed. The documentation did not recommend removing the hard disks and power supplies during the installation which would significantly lower the weight of the device.

The mounting rails are affixed to the side of the BizGuardian box when it is shipped. All you need to do is fix a couple of brackets into the rack and then install the appliance. When installing, you will need to take careful note of the need for three power supplies and two network cables. If you are installing into a location where you have limited rear access, this could be a problem. All access to the hard disks and optical drive is via the rear of the enclosure.