Backup Software - Personal experience with choosing BE replacement

Author

Personal experience with choosing BE replacement

bergoff

2007-08-29, 1:13 am

Hi all,

Fellow geek here and I thought the community might be interested in my
experiences finding a new backup solution to replace B.E. 9.0 -10.0 .

First off, why replace B.E.?

In my case, it was set to backup to a Sony AIT drive that had a top tape
capacity of 35 Gb or so times 7 tapes = 225Gb uncompressed (@ 2/1
compression ratio that's still under 500Gb). I have a primary file server
with over 300 Gb of data on a public share, let alone user home shares,
and other file servers I admin that have less, but still multi-hundreds
of gigabyte capacity).
Bottom line is it just didn't have enough space to do the job. It did 4
years ago when implemented, but didn't have anywhere near the capacity
needed today.

Another sad tale (that bit me in the XXX more than once) is that tapes
routinely FAIL, yet B.E. doesn't let you know about it with very much
veracity, very often, if at all. Many's a time I went to try to restore
and hit tape corruption at the point of the data to be restored that
hadn't been reported by tape maintenance.

I can't get Backup-to-folder to work with a mapped drive, and I can't
find a solution to make that work.

Yet another nail in the B.E. coffin was the inferior Symantec support and
the mountains of "tales of woe" when having to deal the MSSQL database
back end. I didn't know about these until I stared getting SQL log errors
and started Googling.
EeYouch! Did ever before a more crufty solution make it to such
prominence in the backup field??
I found out about most of these issues when I inherited the IT
environment I presently admin.

So I shopped and compared. The criteria in this case was:

1.) Ease of use.
2.) Capacity to hold at least 2 full backups of everything and still have
room for 3 weeks worth of incremental.
4.) Multi-platform viability (I'm backing up mostly a server 2K-2K3 w/
Exchange '03 environment but do have some Apple clients, a few linux Quad
Opteron servers for VMware DR solution, and an AS/400...which is still
relying on manual daily tape backup because it's older than god (15
years)....Ewwwwwwwww!)
5.) Exchange server backup with both full store and individual mail/
mailbox restore capability (for 10 exchange servers in 10 different
domains).
6.)Schedule aware in the case of individual backups. I hate overwrting
last weeks Mon. w/ this weeks Mon. cause the user always wants "a week
ago Sun.", and tells you on Tues.

Some of the solutions that I shopped and compared were:
Achronis
Commvault (plays well with vmware according to the free seminars that
gave they me an iPod shuffle for attending.)
LXI
Backup Exec
Backup Assist

....and I found they all had +/- to each but still INCREDIBLY expensive.

I had chosen as a backup target 2 - Promise M500i iscsi 15 drive SANs
that I populated w/ 750Gb Seagate drives in RAID 5 (I know..I should have
gone RAID 10) for a real world capacity of 9.5 Tb (one for main data
center, one for offsite).
They weighed in @ around $15K total for both SANs and the drives to
populate them.

But I still didn't have a flexible enough solution for software until I
googled around a bit and found Ahsay.

It's actually a software targeted to resellers offering small business
and end user backup over the web, but I didn't see anything w/ that model
that would detract from it's ability to work in my environment.

This software is pretty OS agnostic both on client and server side (I
don't see much documentation for Apple servers, but since they are now
BSD based I don't think it would be an issue to put it on them. It's kind
of a moot point however, as I have never seen an apple server in an
enterprise environment yet. No offense Apple folk). It does Win32, Linux,
and Apple. It could probably be tweaked/hacked to do other *nix OS too.

It does this by being Java based. I know, there have been "java"
experiences that have made us all cringe in the past, but so far, I have
not run into any with this software.

Backup is client application intensive so the server can handle multiple
scheduled jobs at the same time and is only limited by bandwidth.

It has a web GUI for administration (GUI also supplied with client
application for individual "user").

HTTPS and custom configured port communication capable.

The software has a few incentive programs for switching to it from
something else (prior backup solution receipts are necessary) and a
partner program, but both cannot be used at the same time.

In the end I picked it up w/ a 200 user license for under $5K (about
1/10th the expenditure of any other solution I looked at) and it just
works.

Restore time is fast (I like backing up to a RAID for that reason alone)
and backups are data only so far (although the exchange backup will kick
off MSbackup for system state and incorporate it into the regular
backup).

Encryption/compression is done in a 7-zip format and is encrypted with a
recovery key of your choosing (it defaults to user acct. password) and
data recovery is possible with 7-zip alone (open source) and the correct
password.

It DOES NOT do bare metal restore, but I'm hacking away at a Bart's PE
plugin for it that could make that possible.

Daily reports can be configured and have easy outlook rule words like
"Succeed" and "Failed" in the subject for folder filtering (Succeed go
into a periodically emptied folder and Failed deliver directly to my
inbox).

This is NOT Open Source (and if I could have found the same functionality
in backuppc, bacula, or even arkeia; and mailbox restore was a factor for
arkeia as well. I would have gone for it), but Open Source still needs to
become exchange store aware to offer a complete enterprise level backup
solution.

I like mailbox level instead of exchange store backup A LOT!
I did an exchange store backup from tape this year and it was a harrowing
2 day experience. The only saving grace is that what you are restoring is
usually from PEBCAK error and it's hard for them to get antsy about how
long it takes.

The next hurdle is getting the replication software from Ahsay to work.
I'm sure it's something I'm doing, and I'm using Debian (exclusively, I'm
a distro specific Luser) which is not officially supported, so I can't
lay all blame at their feet. But just regular rsync can still do the
trick as a cron job over the microwave WAN.

You can use it in a pure Win32/(64?) environment (although 64 bit
requires you to use distro Java software on the linux side. Otherwise JRE
is built into the software, as well as tomcat web server), But I like
linux as it saves BUSLOADS in licensing costs and CAL accounting
headaches.

My solution was this:

1.) Use open-iscsi on a linux server to connect to SANs, partition into 3
separate reiserfs/ext3 partitions (Backup_Target [4.5Tb], Server_Images
[2.7Tb], and Virtual_Servers [1.87Tb] and then create samba shares of
them (just in case).
2.) Install Ahsay and configure.
3.) Create a "user" per machine to be backed up.
4.) Open a web browser on the client, log in to the server web app, and
install client application from it.
5.) Schedule and forget(ish).

I use VMware (the free software offerings and not ESX) and their
converter application to make images of running machines and import them
into a virtual machine (hardware change is radical enough to trigger WGA
though, so activation should not be done unless necessary. Otherwise you
have a 3 day window to do it within).

From that you can boot the virtual machine and apply the latest backup
from Ahsay and you've just created a pop-in-fresh server with all client
data and configuration.

It's a lot quicker than the usual alternative.

Anyway, I thought you guys might appreciate a different approach and I
welcome your questions and comments.

James

2007-08-31, 7:14 pm

What is B. E. ???

remote.online.backup@gmail.com

2007-09-03, 1:16 pm

On Sep 1, 3:06 am, "James" <jnipper...@nospamfdn.com> wrote:
> What is B. E. ???

Backup Exec, presumably!

Bergoff, thanks for sharing. You may want to have a look at http://www.vembu.com
- their product, StoreGrid does a lot of what you're looking for. The
UI is pretty nifty & performance is quite decent.

But do note: its D2D, no tape!

bergoff

2007-09-04, 1:14 am

Your correct sir....it was a bit oblique using B.E. instead of Backup
Exec. I apologize for that.
I'll give vembu a look as the business I set up with AhSay I no longer
work for (my choice, not theirs). But I was still fairly impressed with
AhSay.