RE: Commerical Backup Solutions

[Blake Pfankuch <blake () pfankuch me>]

First, I work for a managed service provider.  We support a large number of traditional and over the wire backup 
solutions.  We have used Symantec Backup Exec, eVault, Acronis, Intronis, Asigra, Heroware (newer solution more DR 
focused) and many more I've purged from my memory.

I have been using BE since it was Veritas starting in about 2003.  Backup Exec is GREAT if you have a premise Disk 
server with Tape archive, or even a remote over fast WAN.  Acronis is nice, but not easy to manage historically.  
Intronis get not only a no, but a "hell no please die now".  Asigra is probably one of my favorites.  You spend the 
cash for it, but it works right, it integrates with everything, depending on if you get it from a reseller or run your 
own vault, you get good reporting options and BMR is easy as pie.  Heroware has great DR and versioning options but its 
still growing.  Small datacenter platform, I like it a lot.

Aiming at Asigra a little more there are many vendors that offer over the wire backup using this.  Most of them price 
by the gig, but based on what you are doing you could probably do a peer replication where you run your own "vault" 
locally to back up to, and then integrate that to one of many providers to get your off site.  Asigra offers decent 
compression and integration into Windows and nix tools for open file and such.  We have used Asigra to backup up 
anything from nt4 to 2008r2, nix, bsd, as400, esx and esxi.  All the backup stuff is included.  You get the base 
software you get the ability to back up everything it can, with the exception of Message Level backup and restore in 
Exchange, and file level within SharePoint which require another service to be enabled.  The UI has its moments of 
clunky, but it has gotten WAY better over the past few years.  Reporting options are great, as is file growth trending. 
 Restores are tricky the first time, but its just a learning curve like any other app.

As far as BMR restores on above products I've pretty much done them all.  We do a lot of SMB work so many times single 
server, often SBS.  I have done single DC, Exchange servers, mysql servers, file and print servers and many more.  By 
far the trickiest ones are the Windows Small Business Servers based solely on the fact they can be complicated to work 
with as they have Windows, AD, Exchange, SQL, RWW and SharePoint on 1 box.  If you have ever done a BMR of an SBS 
server 2000/2003/2008/2011 if everything isn't perfect you might as well rebuild.  All of these assume you have a well 
managed backup solution which is getting all the data needed for a full restore of course.

Backup Exec its possible and its not that hard.  EVault in theory, but the process can be difficult.  Acronis does a 
very nice job of it.  Intronis don't bother, spend the time working on a resume because a BMR from this is probably a 
career changing event.  I had to attempt it for one customer, I got the data I needed gave it the proverbial finger and 
built a new server to move it onto.  

Asigra makes it really easy.   I have done about 5 (about 18 in our company total) SBS full restores.  You have to jump 
through a few hoops, but we fully restored a failed SBS 2003 server onto a VM while replacement hardware came in in 12 
hours, including line of business SQL app, Exchange, AD and about 200gb of data.

Heroware is very similar in theory.  It works off a replication technology (DoubleTake backend) which does snapshots 
within the replication.  Heroware is designed to have an "appliance" per 10-50 servers depending on size and load so it 
might not scale to the size you are looking.  

Dollars to doughnuts if I had the option, I would do Asigra every time if I had the budget from the customer for the 
offsite.  Why?  Many of the resellers out there even guarantee they can do a 24 or 48 hour RTO of a full environment 
assuming they have the correct backed up date.  It just works that well.  I have done 2 5+ server environments restore 
the whole thing from backups with no problems in 24 hours or less onto mismatched hardware as well.  Keep in mind we 
are working with customers with user counts between 10 and 150 in most cases and usually about $1 per gig  because they 
are lower size.  I've heard rumors of people getting as low as 25 cents a gig, but I cant speak to that.

Yes, I resell many of these products at my day job, however I also implement and support them and work with the various 
support teams from each vendor.  I favor Asigra because of personal preference and ease of use.  

--Blake

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Baird [mailto:joshbaird () gmail com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:01 PM
To: Thomas York
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Commerical Backup Solutions

We have used Symantec's BackupExec (Veritas) in several locations but have standardized on IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager 
(TSM).  Not a fan of IBM, but it works, and it works well.  Be prepared to drop some serious coin, though.  We 
currently use it to do tape backups for over
800+ servers (Linux, AIX, Windows).

Josh

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Thomas York <straterra () fuhell com> wrote:
> We use Barracuda Yosemite backup with about 10 locations all over the 
> world, using disk to disk (single disks via esata and to SANs) and 
> disk to tape (both libraries and single drives). Very rarely do we have issues.
> Barracuda support isn't as good as Yosemite's (Barracuda bought them) 
> but still not bad. Also, the site wide license is a steal! Get a demo, 
> it might fit the bill.
>
> --Thomas York
> On May 17, 2012 6:59 PM, "Mike Lyon" <mike.lyon () gmail com> wrote:
>
> > We used Acronis and it was a nightmare as was their off-shored 
> > support model. Never again... Wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
> >
> > Switched to Iron Mountain LiveVault which backs everything up over 
> > the wire. It has basic reporting functions but not extremely granular.
> > http://ironmountain.com/services/democenter/livevault/player.html
> >
> > Barracuda also seems to have a nice product. Though, i've never used it:
> > http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/backup_overview.php
> >
> > -Mike
> >
> > On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Paul Stewart <paul () paulstewart org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hey folks.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm hoping for some input from operational folks on backup 
> > > solutions for servers.  We are looking for a commercial backup 
> > > solution with a nice reporting dashboard etc.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > It must support full/incremental backups on Windows and various 
> > > flavors
> > of
> > > Linux.  We would also be looking for bare metal image/recovery abilities.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > To date, we've been fond of Acronis until we got the quote for it ..
> > > Initially we would be looking at 50-80 servers and growing it up 
> > > from
> > there
> > > to probably 150-200 boxes.  Some of these servers are 
> > > geographically dispersed.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > At the moment we have been using Bacula but it lacks bare metal 
> > > options
> > and
> > > doesn't have any nice reporting options (Executive Dashboard etc)
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks for any input,
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Paul
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mike Lyon
> > 408-621-4826
> > mike.lyon () gmail com
> >
> > http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon