Veritas Backup Exec for 2000 Advanced Server anything cheaper and good? (1 Viewer)

[KyleS]

Heading says it all I have a client that about had a heart attack when they saw the price on V8.6 of Backup Exec that would work with Windows 2000 Advanced Server for a Travin tape backup 10/20gb SCSI. It would need to backup its drive and 20 workstations and be $800 or less. Anyone know of anything? Will the backup.app program that comes with Windows 2000 get the job done (I dont think so for other computers but correct me if I am wrong). Sounds terrible that they have the money to pay for 2000 Advanced Server and a nice server but skimp on the backup software. Any help is greatly appreciated.

KyleS

 

[Shayne Lebrun]

Ask them how much it would cost for a good chunk of their data to simply BE GONE one day. Get that in writing. Then, get the best backup system they can for that.

My last job, I managed to get a Dell PowerVault 130T tape vault; 4(!) DLTIV drives, 28 DLT tape slots, and a robot arm. We then plugged in Veritas Backup Exec, and all of the sweet agents; SQL Server, Exchange, Solaris, and so on.

Sure, they complained about the cost. But when they later noticed that it meant that when somebody erased something they shouldn't have, the downtime was literally limited to 'how long it takes to wander over to Shayne's desk, or page him, explain what happened, watch him fire up the BE Admin, find the appropriate files, and hit 'restore'' they were pretty happy.

I'm likely preaching to the choir here, but backups are NOT something you fuck around with.

 

[Chris]

I have been an administrator at a large scale medical facility. Redundant backups were (and are) critically important. Veritas was not a choice we made (we left that product) and we also left ArcServe 2000, which was not the product we used.
What did we do?
We picked up a product that changed the way we backed up (and I am not getting paid crap to say this) called Retrospect.. http://www.dantz.com/ Retrospect RULES. With Retrospect, we were able to backup all servers, cheaply. We kept two external Firewire hard drives that it backed up to every night as complete images - an entire network backup was done in less then 2 hours, along with our exchange servers. One drive was moved off site while the others worked.
We kept tape sets using DLT. There was never a question about redundancy, and we were able to store MONTHS of backups, online, for restoral, at any point. Need to go back 4 months? No problem, and restore was so fast it would turn your head.

 

[Kolya]

I use Veritas BE 8.6 to backup several Win2k A/S, Exchange, and SQL Servers. The physical media is an Onstream ADR2.60 (30GB uncompressed).

It's been worth every penny.

 

[Steven K]

NetApp makes a decent product...
of course, there is always EMC

 

[KyleS]

Ask them how much it would cost for a good chunk of their data to simply BE GONE one day. Get that in writing. Then, get the best backup system they can for that.

Shayne, You are preaching to the choir since I have already warned them about the problems with going cheap on their backup solution. I explained the whole "what if someone deletes a directory of info or something on the HD". Of course the response was no one here would do that. I told them maybe not on purpose but it does happen and often. Thanks for the suggestions guys it will at least give them a few more options to choose from.
KyleS

 

[KyleS]

Note: Retrospect Express Backup for Windows supports selected USB/ATAPI tape drives, removable media (Zip, Jaz, SuperDisk, magneto-optical), qualified CD-R/RW, and DVD devices as well as hard drives. However, it does not support back up to SCSI tape drives.

Man Chris Retrospect was starting to look pretty damn good until I found this on their site. Doh

KyleS

 

[Brett DiMichele]

I run Veritas b.e. at work. I use it to schedule and monitor
backups on varying platforms and varying drives. Mainly
we use ibm DDS4 drives but I also use some Exabyte and DLT's
It works well.. For my needs.. Of course most of our 400+
local servers back up to ibm ADSM via Tivoli TSM which is
a complete and utter piece of trash IMHO... TSM is suposed
to be "automated" and I still spend hours each morning
manually re running backups that miss,fail,pending etc..
I guess some of this could be placed on Small Systems for
poor administration on the servers..

 

[Chris]

In a network, why would you use Retrospect Express? Retrospect Network edition is cheap, and supports SCSI tape drives and auto-loaders. We have it working a DLT1 changer from Dell.
If you go to their chart, only Express doesn't support SCSI, it's the cheap (sub $70) version, and definitely wouldn't be what you'd run in a network.
http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCRE...0i3YHr8koVsy7b
For $15 more, you can get the Desktop edition, which does support auto-loaders and SCSI devices. And even their big-boy versions are far less then Veritas or ArcServe (now Brightstor)