First, I work for a managed service provider.  We support a large number of 
traditional and over the wire backup solutions.  We have used Symantec Backup 
Exec, eVault, Acronis, Intronis, Asigra, Heroware (newer solution more DR 
focused) and many more I've purged from my memory.

I have been using BE since it was Veritas starting in about 2003.  Backup Exec 
is GREAT if you have a premise Disk server with Tape archive, or even a remote 
over fast WAN.  Acronis is nice, but not easy to manage historically.  Intronis 
get not only a no, but a "hell no please die now".  Asigra is probably one of 
my favorites.  You spend the cash for it, but it works right, it integrates 
with everything, depending on if you get it from a reseller or run your own 
vault, you get good reporting options and BMR is easy as pie.  Heroware has 
great DR and versioning options but its still growing.  Small datacenter 
platform, I like it a lot.

Aiming at Asigra a little more there are many vendors that offer over the wire 
backup using this.  Most of them price by the gig, but based on what you are 
doing you could probably do a peer replication where you run your own "vault" 
locally to back up to, and then integrate that to one of many providers to get 
your off site.  Asigra offers decent compression and integration into Windows 
and nix tools for open file and such.  We have used Asigra to backup up 
anything from nt4 to 2008r2, nix, bsd, as400, esx and esxi.  All the backup 
stuff is included.  You get the base software you get the ability to back up 
everything it can, with the exception of Message Level backup and restore in 
Exchange, and file level within SharePoint which require another service to be 
enabled.  The UI has its moments of clunky, but it has gotten WAY better over 
the past few years.  Reporting options are great, as is file growth trending.  
Restores are tricky the first time, but its just a learning curve like any 
other app.

As far as BMR restores on above products I've pretty much done them all.  We do 
a lot of SMB work so many times single server, often SBS.  I have done single 
DC, Exchange servers, mysql servers, file and print servers and many more.  By 
far the trickiest ones are the Windows Small Business Servers based solely on 
the fact they can be complicated to work with as they have Windows, AD, 
Exchange, SQL, RWW and SharePoint on 1 box.  If you have ever done a BMR of an 
SBS server 2000/2003/2008/2011 if everything isn't perfect you might as well 
rebuild.  All of these assume you have a well managed backup solution which is 
getting all the data needed for a full restore of course.

Backup Exec its possible and its not that hard.  EVault in theory, but the 
process can be difficult.  Acronis does a very nice job of it.  Intronis don't 
bother, spend the time working on a resume because a BMR from this is probably 
a career changing event.  I had to attempt it for one customer, I got the data 
I needed gave it the proverbial finger and built a new server to move it onto.  

Asigra makes it really easy.   I have done about 5 (about 18 in our company 
total) SBS full restores.  You have to jump through a few hoops, but we fully 
restored a failed SBS 2003 server onto a VM while replacement hardware came in 
in 12 hours, including line of business SQL app, Exchange, AD and about 200gb 
of data.

Heroware is very similar in theory.  It works off a replication technology 
(DoubleTake backend) which does snapshots within the replication.  Heroware is 
designed to have an "appliance" per 10-50 servers depending on size and load so 
it might not scale to the size you are looking.  

Dollars to doughnuts if I had the option, I would do Asigra every time if I had 
the budget from the customer for the offsite.  Why?  Many of the resellers out 
there even guarantee they can do a 24 or 48 hour RTO of a full environment 
assuming they have the correct backed up date.  It just works that well.  I 
have done 2 5+ server environments restore the whole thing from backups with no 
problems in 24 hours or less onto mismatched hardware as well.  Keep in mind we 
are working with customers with user counts between 10 and 150 in most cases 
and usually about $1 per gig  because they are lower size.  I've heard rumors 
of people getting as low as 25 cents a gig, but I cant speak to that.

Yes, I resell many of these products at my day job, however I also implement 
and support them and work with the various support teams from each vendor.  I 
favor Asigra because of personal preference and ease of use.  

--Blake

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Baird [mailto:joshba...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:01 PM
To: Thomas York
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Commerical Backup Solutions

We have used Symantec's BackupExec (Veritas) in several locations but have 
standardized on IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).  Not a fan of IBM, but it 
works, and it works well.  Be prepared to drop some serious coin, though.  We 
currently use it to do tape backups for over
800+ servers (Linux, AIX, Windows).

Josh

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Thomas York <strate...@fuhell.com> wrote:
> We use Barracuda Yosemite backup with about 10 locations all over the 
> world, using disk to disk (single disks via esata and to SANs) and 
> disk to tape (both libraries and single drives). Very rarely do we have 
> issues.
> Barracuda support isn't as good as Yosemite's (Barracuda bought them) 
> but still not bad. Also, the site wide license is a steal! Get a demo, 
> it might fit the bill.
>
> --Thomas York
> On May 17, 2012 6:59 PM, "Mike Lyon" <mike.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We used Acronis and it was a nightmare as was their off-shored 
>> support model. Never again... Wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
>>
>> Switched to Iron Mountain LiveVault which backs everything up over 
>> the wire. It has basic reporting functions but not extremely granular.
>> http://ironmountain.com/services/democenter/livevault/player.html
>>
>> Barracuda also seems to have a nice product. Though, i've never used it:
>> http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/backup_overview.php
>>
>> -Mike
>>
>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Paul Stewart <p...@paulstewart.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hey folks.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > I'm hoping for some input from operational folks on backup 
>> > solutions for servers.  We are looking for a commercial backup 
>> > solution with a nice reporting dashboard etc.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > It must support full/incremental backups on Windows and various 
>> > flavors
>> of
>> > Linux.  We would also be looking for bare metal image/recovery abilities.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > To date, we've been fond of Acronis until we got the quote for it ..
>> > Initially we would be looking at 50-80 servers and growing it up 
>> > from
>> there
>> > to probably 150-200 boxes.  Some of these servers are 
>> > geographically dispersed.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > At the moment we have been using Bacula but it lacks bare metal 
>> > options
>> and
>> > doesn't have any nice reporting options (Executive Dashboard etc)
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Thanks for any input,
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Paul
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Mike Lyon
>> 408-621-4826
>> mike.l...@gmail.com
>>
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon
>>


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