Advice Server Backups

[soze]

I am hoping someone here might know if some better software.

My company uses Symantec Backup Exec and it is god awful, 2012 is just gash. We backup about 15 VM's and 2 physical servers. We backup to disk then move to tape. And we need the GRT style backups where we can restore 1 email or 1 file as well as the whole server if we need.

I have downloaded a trial of Veeam but I am not sure if that does GRT. We use Arcserve in a few places and it has not impressed me. Does anyone know if any other decent alternatives?

 

[TdC]

arcserve, wow, that's a blast from the past. Soze mate, we use TSM for nearly everything but I'm semi sure investing in one of those is totally out of the question? I assume you're running a windows?

 

[soze]

Yes Windows Servers. And buying anything would be a problem. But we are an IBM / Lenovo partner so I can ask an account manager about getting NRF software, does it need specific hardware do you know?. I will take a look at it more tomorrow cheers for the suggestion.

 

[TdC]

I find TSM to be hella awesome in it's power and simplicity. It is IBM afaik. We use it with multiple tape silos in the server bunkers, with robots and such, but afaik it should scale down to like one tape unit or something. We actually got the robots because we had like a million billion tape units and they're hella expensive. The robots are also *blink* pricey, but hey ho management loves them

 

[Ch3tan]

Surely this is the time to look at cloud based backups and get rid of the clunky tapes?

 

[Deebs]

Surely this is the time to look at cloud based backups and get rid of the clunky tapes?

And get anal raped by bandwidth charges and then the really really really shit I/O performance they offer on their "cheap" storage.

 

[soze]

Surely this is the time to look at cloud based backups and get rid of the clunky tapes?

We have lots of customers on this and for the files it is fine. But for the Disaster Recovery style backups it is not so great. So we tend to take a full Windows backup monthly to a USB Disk then backup Exchange SQL and files ect to "the cloud" it works ok for some. But we want to have all of our VM's on media so if everything goes tits up we can take it to another office and restore them back to a different Host.

 

[TdC]

I love cloud stuff. Set something up, demo or poc it, get rid of it. Permanent, or high volume....holy gang-rape batman!

 

[Overdriven]

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager... Mmm, might not do for you though. We backup to tape still though. DPM is good for some things.

 

[Tuthmes]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

 

[Cadelin]

Surely this is the time to look at cloud based backups and get rid of the clunky tapes?

Cloud based storage is still between 3 and 6 times more expensive than you can do it yourself.

Also there are many advantages to tape compared to disk still (energy use, media lifetime, storage density, data security).

 

[Kryten]

Both tape and cloud storage can fuck off in this day and age. Veeam is extremely capable (and does handle single file backup restoration just fine). We use a mixture of Veeam for our ESX kit and BackupAssist.
You just need to be careful with compressed VHD backups that most "NTBackup"/"Windows Server Backup" frontend systems offer by default - those can only restore volumes and not single files.

 

[old.Osy]

Tape is still the most resilient medium in time, and it is very useful when it comes to DR purposes. Everyone was forecasting the death of tape since 5 years ago, or more. Yet here we have the LTO-6 standard introduced just recently, with 2.4 TB uncompressed in one single tape. Boom.

No problem with backing up to disk then tape, that's still the safest way to do it, albeit not the fastest.

I'm currently re-thinking the way we backup things in our company, for some years we've been doing tape only, with only critical stuff also to disk.

We use both ArcServe and Networker. ArcServe from CA is VERY user friendly, you set everything up in 30 minutes or more, depending on complexity, number of servers or services, etc.

Networker is more solid, and very reliable with restores (The Audit team will love you), but in order to change its setup or deploy it, you first have to travel to the forest of the little green people, blow the mystic frog twice, use its cum to concoct a magic potion which you then use to travel to the future, just so you don't have to deal with setting it up. Apart from that, it's flawless.

Some sales people have flaunted a supposedly holy grail of backup at us couple weeks ago, called Simpana, although I've never heard of it being used in production in my neck of the woods, so I don't know...

2 cents and all.