Enterprise Backup Solution

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ManateeMatt

Limp Gawd
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May 27, 2009
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As the [H]ardForum has lots of professional IT people in it I figured this would be the best place to ask. I need to come up with a better solution the backuppc for backing up windows servers that run everything from exchange to random CMS software. I have looked at Avamar as I hear its damn good, and works well over wan but the price tag basically put a stop to it. I am also looking at CA ARCserve. I am looking for solutions that allow me to use big cheep arrays made from a bunch of low-cost disks and linux mdadm or ZFS. Now that being said, it doesn't have to run on Linux, but something that can connect to iscsi or nsf storage. It would be nice if it had a webUI but not necessary

I wanted to hear what peoples experience with their backup software is.
 
I never used Avamar because I wasn't senior enough to do it, but my buddy who was the senior helpdesk guy was the point of contact for it... it is a beast. But once you learn it, it worked out pretty well. They had a lot of training and a lot of initial issues, but in the end I would say they were happy with the investment. As long as you get it set up properly and efficiently... which I think they kind of struggled with.

 
C7J0yc3 said:
Acronis, Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 backup.

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looking for something a little bit better then the default windows backup. Its not particularity WAN friendly, and not easy to manage across multiple sites / multiple domains. I am looking for something that can do nice exchange backup instead of just copying the DB.
 
http://www.r1soft.com/
R1Soft CDP. The server is free. You buy agents for each server you want to back up, Windows or Linux. SQL & Mysql backups supported. It's an okay product. I'm using it for a client who owns two businesses, each with their own server. Backup server is at the owner's house. Then it grabs the data every other day from each site and stores on the server at the owner's house. This compliments onsite backups obviously.
 
ManateeMatt said:
looking for something a little bit better then the default windows backup. Its not particularity WAN friendly, and not easy to manage across multiple sites / multiple domains. I am looking for something that can do nice exchange backup instead of just copying the DB.
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Acronis, does it all.....
 
I have never dumped backups to NFS or iSCSI, we have always used tape loaders everywhere I have ever worked. We do dump to local disk and then to tape though using BackupExec 2010 R2.

Have you looked at BackupExec from Symantec yet? It is kind of a pain to get going but once it is setup it just runs for us. They also have an agent for just about every major enterprise product out there as well.

It sounds like you have a typical Microsoft infrastructure. Windows, Exchange, SQL, etc. which the agents are not too expensive. It is when you get into SharePoint and Oracle is when it gets a little expensive.
 
Check out Crashplan, cheap, super reliable with good encryption on compression. I've migrated to it at the last two companies I worked at- it's a great product.
 
I second Symantec Backup Exec 2010, great product, lots of options, it does it all, to disk or tape.
 
We're using Replay 4 from AppAssure http://www.appassure.com/

It works great. Snapshots can be taken as often as you like, so some of our servers can be fully recovered from as little as 15 minutes ago. It's a full backup too, not just file data. It can do bare-metal recovery, keep an offline backup copy, etc. Not cheap, but worth the investment.

If you're backing up virtual servers, then you only need to buy the license for the host machines. That's what we're doing.

The Replay Core machine can also replicate to other Cores offsite or in a different building for maximum data protection. Not as portable as tapes are, but the recovery time is very fast. The backups can be mounted as a volume which is then browsable like any other drive on the server. Data can be restored to the original location or somewhere else.

They have an add-on for Exchange that also works very well. No messing around with mounting databases and such. We've done very granular restores, right down to a particular message in a folder in someone's inbox.
 
Do you currently have a budget?

How many TB of data are you looking to backup?

Do you have a need for replicating backups offsite?
 
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