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I’m hoping someone out there can give me some practical ideas for upgrading out backup solution.

Currently we use EMC Network as the backup software / manager and we are backing up to an old Sony AIT-5 tape library which is slow and unreliable.

Right now we are backing up to tape, a full every Friday night and incremental’s each day after that. Tapes are sent offsite with a secure carrier daily and rotated weekly. At the end of each month we are required to make a full backup and send it offsite for 7 years.

We are backing up 11 servers (some physical and some virtual) for a total of around 2 TB’s of data uncompressed. Servers include DC’s, Exchange, SQL, IIS Servers, and other file and application servers.

We love the idea of cloud backup but our biggest hurdle is our data retention requirements. Because of that we are considering a local backup appliance that will perform the backups then write the data to tape (this makes short term data recovery, say within 30 days, much easier).

Could anyone suggest any vendors and/or solutions that might be a good fit? We haven’t upgraded our backup solution in probably 5+ years so I’m pretty behind the curve with the modern solutions.

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That is an intense back-up from my standpoint - you are in the right place and hopefully one of the Symantec folks can you point you in the right direction. Good luck !

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I’d recommend you look into Unitrends - they make a great line of appliances, and their support is top-notch!

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Take a look at ShadowProtect, it can send images of the servers off site. It is very efficient at doing backups, only backing up what changes and consolidating them at the end of the day, week and month. You can also have the backups sent off-site to a different location or the cloud. Restoring files and servers are a snap. I am sure one of the StorageCraft reps will be porting more info on this thread.

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you’re going to find a lot of support for unitrends here - I would recommend them as well - they can be slightly higher in cost but it’s worth it - just think of the price you’ll pay should your solution not work in time of need

take a look at how they stack up to other solutions http://unitrends.com/resources/competitive-analysis.html

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If you get chance to move to a disk-to-disk solution then you are in a great position. You obviously have the ability to send data outside of your environment so definitely look for a trusted cloud backup provider that is offering an enterprise quality solution which is costed on capacity. It is key to do your research so find a provider with a good customer base, using a recognised backup software and that have geographically separate data centre locations. Make sure you have one that has a hardware agnostic offering and works with both physical and virtual server environments. 2TB isn’t a lot of data but I don’t know what your bandwidth is like or data change so choose a provider that de-duplicates at source, compresses and sends incrementally forever, on both flat files and databases. If you tick all these boxes then your backup windows will be small, retention will be very efficient and you can say goodbye to tape media forever!

Thanks

Rob

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Unitrends could work. We do this for clients, they have Unitrends on site for speed of backup / recovery but then shuttle off to us a copy of the Unitrends device stored in a hosted Unitrends device that we manage for them so they get the “cloudness” without weird pricing and everything is very predictable and if they want to move back to purely on-premise it can be shipped back to them.

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one thing i recommend is working closely with your auditing team to seperate out what needs to be retained for how long. You may be able to set up a more complex combination where a much smaller amount of data is being backed up for offsite long term retention (I always recommend tape that can handle abuse and sitting for this long but there are others that trust the “cloud” hosts to still be around in 7+ years) you could then have your immediate backups go to some sort of local hard drive array and replicate file data to an offsite “cloud service” or DR location. What files you backup and retain often is as important as what system you use. If possible go with a backup software that can be installed in one location and will grab data from multiple servers and locations and centralize it to one storage point. I was using Netbackup combined with Veam but i suspect there are single systems out there that work better.

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Sierra and Scott I agree with your comments. If you choose the correct provider they will be able to assist with setting up multiple retention rules with sufficient granularity.

For example:

System State Backups - All generations for 30 days only

User Data - All generations for 30 days with monthly recovery points for 1 year

Financial Data - All generations for 30 days, monthly recovery points for 1 year, yearly recovery points for 7 years

We use Asigra as our backup engine which is agentless so only needs to be installed on one physical or virtual device within the customers environment. You can then backup all data types incrementally and keep both a local copy and all data offsite at the same time. I have seen good reviews of Unitrends also so stay with one of main software / service houses and your data will be safe and well managed ensuring peace of mind.

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Disk to disk with near continuous data protection will greatly simplify your life.

Take a look at Idera Server Backup, Comprehensive IT and Database Management Tools | IDERA . With your environment you should be able to have the solution up and running in less than 15 minutes per server!

Download the trial and give it a try or take a test drive from a live installation on our site.

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Keith,

Plenty of good recommendations so far. EVault is a Seagate Company, and has been in the backup and disaster recovery business since 1997. It sounds like a disk to disk to cloud approach might suit your needs, and we offer options where you can backup (and restore) locally to an appliance as well as replicate data offsite to the Cloud for long-term retention and disaster recovery purposes. You can go here to learn more about EVault technology and here for more about our dedupe, compression and encryption.

Here are a few more questions which might help other provide more suggestions:

  • Do you have to protect PCs/laptops too?
  • What’s your RTO/RPO?
  • Do you have a DR plan? Do you need to recover both systems AND data offsite in the event of disaster or site outage?

Best of luck in your search and feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
John

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Have you considered Quorum’s Hybrid-Cloud solution ? Quorum takes VSS snapshots of your production environment and creates recovery nodes for each server in a virtual environment. The recovery nodes (RNs) are updated with every snapshot and are tested every time a change is made - they are assured to work as expected in a crisis situation.

For localized outages (i.e. hardware failure) your users access the HA appliance that is behind your firewall, and in the event of a disaster (i.e. flood, extended power outage, etc.) users access the Recovery Nodes in one of our data centers. They only need to VPN in; no need to reconfigure IP addresses or deal with subnets which allows for quick recovery.

Quorum commonly protects Exchange, A/D, SharePoint and SQL servers for its customers. Also, roughly 1/3 of Quorum’s customer base is in the Financial Services vertical, as the ability to test the entire environment daily helps with auditors. Quorum also offers a companion appliance called Archive Vault for those customers who require long-term data retention for Regulatory and eDiscovery requirements.

Please feel free to call/email me with any questions.

Kind regards,

Joe

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Hi Agencylns…

Backup Exec sounds like a good fit here. Depending on your P to V ration, you may be a perfect fit for V-Ray Edition, which includes unlimited agents & options per occupied socket.

BE will handle your environment as is, but will also be ready for any hardware changes or additional applications you add.

Happy to dig deeper if you want to DM me any questions.

Matt

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Thank you everyone for the suggestions, information, and considerations. We have always just kept all data for 7 years because its what was in place when I got here and never really thought to question it and at the same time our current system is not that flexible.

We replicate our business critical data and servers to a hosted DR provider. tape recovery is for secondary non missions critical data so we would just need access to that data with 8-24 hrs since the first 4-8 hours will be bringing out systems online at our DR facility.

I think we will either need a Cloud storage that can keep those full backups every 30 days for 7 years like we require or still go to tape and send those offsite. We cannot simply replicate or backup to a single “box” at a DR site because if we lost our DR site we would lose all of our backups.

Like numerous people suggested I would like to look into Unitrends offerings and those of eVault’s

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Hello, yes a lot of good stuff on here. Have you looked at EMC Data Domain? You already have the Networker Software to the pairing may work very well for you. Data Domain is a leading solution in the Purpose Built Backup Appliance market. We have over 60% marketshare.

Plus we can look at your Netwoker and make sure you have the most up to date version and discuss the retention requirements and options for replication of data or tape out options. Feel free to message me and we can talk more.

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Thanks for all the Unitrends mentions! From what you’ve described, it sounds like Unitrends would be a great fit since you can use Unitrends for a local backup as well as replicating to the cloud, and archiving off to removable media. We do offer a free version if you’d like to try our software out, www.unitrends.com/ffree . Please let me know what questions I can answer for you about Unitrends, and good luck in your search.

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Quantum vmPRO is free up to 1TB and also offers a virtual NAS as well for a target with dedupe for free. It does the backups in native format as well. Im testing it out right now and will keep it around just because its free but im doing backup to offsite location with its own vCenter and technically they could bring up my backup at their location in no time since its backed up in VMWare native format.

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If you are looking for an enterprise quality backup and recovery solution that is great value then look at these few links, which include a customer video and link to further detail. The solution we offer is based on Asigra which has been in development for over 26 years and is agentless. The solution will be fully managed with an online monitoring portal, with real time backup reporting and email notifications, ensuring absolute peace of mind and extremely efficient backup and storage. If you have any questions drop me a message, we are based in the UK. Thanks

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Hello AgencyIns, did you consider an option to virtualize the rest of the servers? Why do you keep them physical?

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Thanks for the StorageCraft mentions!

Hello Keith,

StorageCraft produces the award-winning ShadowProtect backup/recovery software. We also provide a free admin software called ImageManager. The ImageManager tool will replicate your backups offsite and to the cloud with the ability to schedule bandwidth loads during business hours. ImageManager also automatically checks and rechecks your backups and notifies you in the event of any problems. ImageManager allows you to set retention policies and consolidate backups for long-term archival. It also includes the patented HeadStart Restore technology which allows you to pre-stage a recovery to a VM or new physical hardware.

Feel free to download a trial copy of these applications from our website and try them for yourself. If you would like a free demo I can arrange one for you, simply PM me with the details.

Cheers!