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I am trying to get a solution to backup a small data center.

I have 19 VM’s, about 2.5TB, and the current provider, UniTrends, is not working for me, have not been for 16 months. They have been working with me for 16 months because they have temporarily fixed errors. Today here is where I am standing:

  • they upgraded my appliance server that broke a backup job, then said it was not a supported feature, the one they broke; the feature was including an exclusion list.
  • Issue to start is that they created it and told me to use it, then broke it and won’t fix.
  • In the whole process I also found out that their cloud centers have ZERO redundancy, so if they go down and lose stuff, so do I and every one else; they said there has been a discussion about fixing that.

What it means is I need a solution, similar to eversafe-backup.com to use. Any suggestions, Eversafe has a demo that shows what it can do and it looks strong and is HIPAA compliant which is another requirement.

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Check out the new thread on WD Arkeia Appliances. They also offer real software that you can install and run on your own hardware.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/387275-first-impressions-of-the-western-digital-arkeia-backup-appliance-line

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Storagecraft - they have replication to the cloud as well as self managed backups. - I am sure that Steven will be by here soon enough to get you the details. I had issues just trying out Unitrends - I stuck with Storagecraft.

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StarsFan,

I understand your frustration and certainly agree with boatsnjeepnlinux. You should take a look at WD Arekia and we will be more than happy to assist you with evaluation process. Please let me know.

Thanks.

Rameil.

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Starsafe -I’m sorry to hear a out the issues that you’ve experienced. Can you PM me your asset tag information so that I can look into this further for you?

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Hey Michael,

We can definitely help you with your backup/recovery issues. You’re welcome to peruse our online resources yourself (check out our Spiceworks vendor page, our website , or the blog ). If you’d like to PM me your information I’m glad to call you personally to get you what you need to make an informed decision.

Cheers!

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Hi Michael,

Another approach that would cost substantially less than the solutions you’re using and considering is enterprise-grade backup and DR from Zetta.net that enables you to:

  • Have an on-premise backup without buying and appliance

  • Have an offsite backup in redundant bi-coastal SSAE-16 certified datacenters

  • Stay HIPAA compliant

  • Lower your backup costs up to 50%

Happy to respond to any questions or comments in this thread also.

Thanks!

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Michael,

I don’t want to pile on with a recommendation since it would help to know more about your environment and requirements:

  • Do you need to protect physical servers as well?
  • What platforms and applications are you backing up?
  • Do you have to protect PCs/laptops too?
  • What’s your bandwidth?
  • What’s your RTO/RPO?
  • Does your company have a disaster recovery plan? Do you need to recover both your systems AND data offsite in the event of disaster or site outage?
  • Do you have an offsite data center for DR purposes? If not are you willing to outsource to a cloud DR service provider?

Good luck in your search and DM me if you have any questions.

John

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I appreciate that and it makes sense to know.

  • Do you need to protect physical servers as well? not as of today
  • What platforms and applications are you backing up? 2008R2 and SQL 2012 Enterprise. That would be backed up in 3 of the VMs
  • Do you have to protect PCs/laptops too? No PC or Laptops, how ever there is thought of maybe later, next year, 3rd quarter, of using file redirection in which case the files would increase
  • What’s your bandwidth? currently 6mb bonded T1’s going to 10MB fiber in October
  • Does your company have a disaster recovery plan? Do you need to recover both your systems AND data offsite in the event of disaster or site outage? Getting set up as we speak with spare blades for fail-over
  • Do you have an offsite data center for DR purposes? If not are you willing to outsource to a cloud DR service provider? Looking for a HIPAA compliant offsite for storage of backups as well as local.
  • www.eversafe-backup.com/ has the main solutions we are looking for except that they do not provide for file level backup but that can be configured relatively easily.
  • Would like to be able to spin up and operate from the cloud, similar to the demo on eversafes site, the short video gives you what you need.

That is it quick and rough, please start your builds around that, I have heard of evault and it has been positive so that is a good sign so far.

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Michael,

I’m sorry to hear that you are having challenges with your current DR solution. If you are interested in alternatives, please consider Quorum. Many of our current customers are in regulated industries such as Financial Services, Legal Services and Healthcare.

We approach HA/DR similar to Unitrends, Axcient and AppAssure; however, we have architectural differences in the product which allow for automated testing of the HA/DR environment every time it is updated, for example. There are several others I’d be happy to explain in detail should you be interested in further discussion.

Also, if you have a moment, please take a look at the Arizona Medical Board case study for more background information.

Kind regards,

Joe

PS - Jay, thanks for the Quorum mention!!

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Check out Idera Server Backup. You can download a free trial or take a test drive of a live backup server at: http://demo.idera.com/

You can get started with up to 50 VMs for $995.00. That includes Exchange and SQL Server as well as 1 year of support.

We have a nice whitepaper with more details on compliance: http://www.idera.com/sitecore/content/corporate/home/resourcecentral/whitepapers/how-compliance-impacts-backup-strategy?rt=whitepaper&q=server%20backup&t=Server%20Backup%20White%20Papers

Hope this helps!

Randy Bowie | Idera

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I am far from this marketing jibberjabber - check out Veeam B&R :wink:

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StarsFan, Axcient’s hybrid solution sounds like it would be a good fit for you. You get a local appliance backup as well as a cloud backup for that disaster recovery day. Axcient is also HIPAA compliant. :]

Please feel free to shoot me a message if you have any questions, but in the meantime check out our demo and trial .

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G’day StarsFan,

Totally agree with the WD Arkeia solution / method.

Be in control of your hardware and backup procedures at all times.

External backups needing to access this via the internet and sitting in some cloud, I do NOT recommend. If your system fails you don’t have access to the internet or your backups in the cloud. If on the other hand you have a WD Arkeia setup the hardware and the backups are in front of you.

Totally suggest an internal, you own it, solution like the WD Arkeia

Regards

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Thank you, I am in the process of reviewing and talking to all the suggestions. So far I have gathered that the best way is to have an internal box, WD Arkeia is getting the most mentions. For cloud storage, required by the business, I have gotten some good responses on services.

I am starting to contact those that contacted me, I’ll be providing the details of what is needed and requirements. The requirements are pretty simple but I have to be certain that they are there, for instance not being HIPAA compliant is an automatic deal breaker. Other then that it is more feature based of wants then needs.

Michael

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AppAssure and storage-craft are both similar products. From my experience AppAssure does a significantly higher rate of compression and also does a more in-depth corruption/application check. Also Storage craft has limitations with virtualization. The replication is also with AppAssure, you can replicate to their cloud, to your own data center (for msps) or to any third party cloud. I’d be happy to assist as i’ve had experience with both products.

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Hi Tom,

You are right that AppAssure and StorageCraft have some similarities. I just wanted to clarify a few points regarding StorageCraft’s features. First, data compression obviously depends a lot on the type of data being compressed. That being said I usually see system volume compression around 65%; which means that if your system volume was originally 100GB a full backup of your OS, data, installed applications, and everything else would end up around 35GB. These values are from my own experience backing up several Windows server and desktop systems.

Second, I’m not sure what “limitations with virtualization” you’re referring to so I’ll just speak about what StorageCraft can do. Both StorageCraft and AppAssure can backup and recover Hyper-V and VMware ESXi virtual machines. StorageCraft can also backup and restore VM’s running on the Citrix XenServer, Oracle VirtualBox or Red Hat KVM hypervisor platforms. I believe AppAssure can do this as well, but you’d have to confirm with them.

StorageCraft also offers a Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) technology to automatically remove hardware drivers from a backup image and then appropriately add new drivers to the restore target. This technology alone is “gold” for anyone migrating from P2V, V2V, P2P, or V2P. In the case of a virtual environment this is useful as HIR will remove ghost NIC’s and other hardware drivers not part of the typical hypervisor platform.

Finally, StorageCraft’s ImageManager replicates backups offsite using either Intelligent FTP or our proprietary ShadowStream technology. This technology allows WAN acceleration, bandwidth scheduling functionality, and both near- and far-side administration with automated alerts. Oh, and ImageManager is a FREE software so you can install it wherever you store your backup images to automatically check and re-check the integrity of your backup chains. ImageManager will replicate to StorageCraft’s cloud, an MSP’s data center or to a third party cloud.

May I also recommend that you check out our customer reviews in Spiceworks and other sites as well as competitive reviews about AppAssure. Also check out support forums online as you do your due diligence. And finally, I would recommend that you get a copy of each product and do your own backup and recovery to see for yourself which tool works better.

Cheers!

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Michael,

The WD Sentinel product is pretty slick. StorageCraft has partnered with WD and we’re currently running a promotional offer on the WD Sentinel (up to 16TB) purchased through the channel.

Cheers