Commerical Backup Solutions

Fri May 18 14:41:40 UTC 2012

I wanted to add that I've had some recent experience with Asigra (and
specifically pitting it against Evault), and they are currently a little
behind in VADP and other VMWare related feature sets, and their Linux
distribution support is very limited (basically no support for anything but
RedHat).  They also charge extra for the web console.

Overall for our needs, Evault beat out Asigra, but there isn't anything
horribly wrong with Asigra's product either.

-Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: Blake Pfankuch [mailto:blake at pfankuch.me] 
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:31 PM
To: Josh Baird; Thomas York
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: RE: Commerical Backup Solutions

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 at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:01 PM
To: Thomas York
Cc: nanog at 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 at 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 at 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 at 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 at gmail.com
>>
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon
>>