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Spiceheads,

A client of mine wants to dive into a Backup solution. Right now he is looking at Hardware, Software, and Cloud options and his final solution could incorporate parts of all 3 or 2 of the 3 in the end. However, in the Software arena, who else is both popular and well regarded for Backup software besides Symantec BackupExec?

CA ArcServe?

What else?

It is worth noting that we are also reviewing Veeam, but that is more for the backing up of his VM’s, for the purpose of this discussion I am looking for software suggestions similar to what BackupExec does and is capable of.

Thanks in advance for your input.

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What apps / platforms he needs to backup? VMware? Hyper-V? SQL? Other DBs? Exchange? Files? How much data?

Yep. ArcServe is an option, Also Unitrends.

Cloud backup can be useful as an additional layer of backup, I wouldn’t use it as the only layer of backup.

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Unitrends. Does file-level, bare-metal, VM-level, and you have the option to archive, or replicate offsite. If you go with an appliance, you also have Instant Recovery right on the device. I have an appliance and I love it - I no longer worry about my backups, and my DR planning has been greatly simplified.

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For the last few years I have been using Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. The backup agent is aware of what services are running on the server it’s installed on (SQL, SharePoint, Hyper-V, etc) and is a breeze to backup and restore. For example, you can restore a SQL DB to the original SQL instance, another instance, or to a file path with just a few clicks. It is capable of item-level recovery as well as BMR and system state. It also supports tape drives so you can off-site as well.

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Thanks to both of you, Unitrends continues to come up as a great solution and luckily we are a Unitrends partner. I have recommended Unitrends to them and I had encouraged them to attend a live demo to see what they thought. I will follow up with them on that, thanks for the input.

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i hate saying it but backup exec seems to do most things although the new interface is sooooooooooooooo bad. We are going to look into unitrends as alot of fellow spicers seem to rate it.

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Bacula! If you don’t have resource or don’t want to deal with the “director” part of the backup infra, you can buy for a decent amount of $$$ from www.bacula4hosts.com

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Hey Jeb…

If you’d like to dig into Backup Exec a bit more, I’d be happy to answer any questions you have w/r/t specifics like App GRT, virtualization, P2V conversions…whatever is in your environment.

Drop me a PM and I’ll send you my direct contact info.

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Matt,

This request is not for me… it’s for a client of mine that is digging into a Backup solution. Once I get a better feel for what direction he wants to go, I would be happy to get in touch with you.

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Jeb, what environment, type of data to backup and how much data are we talking about, may I ask? Maybe all your client needs is a ROBOCOPY tool :wink:

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It’s a mostly Windows environment, with some Linux, the data is primarily block/database and they have around 11TB right now.

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I switched from backup exec to Unitrends 5 years ago and have never been Happier. Not only was it a huge cost savings i find the bare metal restore very useful. Even our DBA said that Unitrends is the only software he seen that delivered on the database side in the time of need.

we have had to do 2 major recoveries due to SAN loss with both products and Unitrends made it so much easier there is no comparison. And I use it to back my VM’s too (I use vCloud Director in house)

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Neal… Unitrends continues to make it’s presence known as a great player in this space, and Katie is a great resource on here.

I have already recommended Unitrends to my client, but I will continue to reinforce the support and make sure he gives them a full review.

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Thank you for information.

I have no perfect solution because there are many things to consider, but I just want to list some of them as a reminder:

  1. how much data has to be backed up

  2. how often data needs to be backed up (daily incremental or differential + full backups?)

  3. how fast is Internet connection (enough for online backup?)

  4. what media is going to be used for backups (NAS, Tape Library, etc)

  5. what’s the time frame in which all the data has to be backed up including full backup (overnight, couple of hours, over the weekend, etc)

  6. are the services needed to be shutdown for backup?

  7. time frame for recovery and complexity of this operation

the list can go on… maybe a combination of software and hardware? Acronis is another vendor to look at.

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Thanks for all of the Unitrends recommendations guys!

Jeb - Please let me know if you have any specific Unitrends questions that I can assist with. I’m happy to get one of our engineers on the line to discuss the options, so just let me know what you need.

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Katie,

Bill Grady and I are fully engaged on this opportunity and we are working on next steps… I just wanted to take an unbiased poll of what other Spiceheads recommended, but clearly you win again!

For anyone who isn’t familiar, Katie is the #1 partner resource on Spiceworks and armed with great information.

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Jeb - You are too kind! I’m so glad that Bill is taking care of you, and that the community has reaffirmed your decision. Please let me know if there is anything that i can do to assist.

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I’m going to have to check these Unitrends folks out after all this high-talk. My solution has been good to me, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a better one out there.

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RRasco,

You definitely should… they have live demos twice weekly and Katie, who posted above, is super helpful. Talk to her.

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Robert - Here’s a link to our twice weekly demos (thanks Jeb!). Please let me know what questions I can answer for you specifically about Unitrends.

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