When Symantec's away... 28-year-old Asigra becomes 'overnight' cloud backup success There are dozens of backup system and software providers and it’s easy enough for the ones not in the front rank to fade into the background, until you read something like this: “Asigra … has reached the one million customer site deployment milestone with nearly half of new instalments produced in the past 12 months.” There …
What? You mean closed their cloud service? Or took an ageing product which had architecture dating back to the 80s and totally re-wrote it from the ground up to make it a credible product for modern backup?
I don't know if you've done any serious work with Backup Exec prior to 2012, but let me assure you (as someone who works for one of Symantec's rivals) that scratch under the UI and it was a total pain, the inclusion of Powershell was a seriously good move. The transition may have been handled better, but it is really a classic example of "IT guy can't take change". Most of the complaints seemed to be from people who just installed 2012 over 2010 R3 with no pre-prod testing and expected it to be the same, then were horrified that they'd just knocked out their production backup environment. To make it worse, they just bitched about it on the Internet, rather than either learning 2012 or recovering their old 2010R3 environment. (clue: If you're a backup guy and you've just killed your production backup environment you *really* should be able to recover it, if you can't, you've failed at your job.)
Have to cry bullshit on that I'm afraid. Been using 2012 since it came out and, with SP3 installed, it's STILL shit. Updates have resolved serious issues with performance or reporting. Agent backups of critical systems, including Symantec's own Enterprise Vault don't function as they should. Server regularly stops responding mid backup even on the simplest of tasks. I've spent hours on the phone with Symantec support, usually to be greeted with "It'll be fixed in the next patch".
I will say that their support function is pretty damn good - just the devs don't seem to give a shit about the product or the end user.
I have to say again that you should have known all this before you upgraded, if it didn't suit or you felt it wasn't ready you shouldn't have upgraded. You obviously didn't carry out adequate testing and have backed yourself into a corner where you can't move back to 2010R3.
Everyone knew that BEX2012 was going to be a big change and that should have necessitated big testing. It looks like you, along with many others, have played fast a loose with your backup infrastructure. It's not even as if 2010R3 is out of support so there was no pressure to move for that reason.
I'm not meaning to be judgemental, but "backup guy installs new software replacing his company's existing software and it turns out that it's faulty. He then decides that he'll accept it, not roll back and hope that it's fixed in the next service pack".
Either the problems are less severe than you're making out or you've messed up, I can't see any other angle here.
>We have over 1000 people in 350 businesses (FCA regulated and HM Government included) across four continents using our Cloud based Accounting and Business solution. Most definitely serious businesses!<
That's fewer than 3 people per business... those people might be serious about their business, but I don't think it's what the previous poster meant by 'serious businesses'.
“Asigra … has reached the one million customer site deployment milestone with nearly half of new instalments produced in the past 12 months.”
Yet I've worked in backup for 15 odd years and never heard of them. I'm not sure how many customers TSM/Networker/NetBackup have, but I can't imagine it's that many. It appears that Asigra supply a backup product that is designed for individuals as end users, are they counting the end users (or clients) as each customer, rather than the places where their software is installed?
Hello Anonymous Coward! It's too bad you haven't heard of Asigra. We've been around for 28 years. To be honest, we're not quite sure we've heard of you either? But the numbers you're reading are correct. We provide backup software to our channel of partners (that span in the 1000s), internationally. And our total number of installations has surpassed 1,000,000. We're talking about the places, not the people. If you care to learn more about our offering you can find us on https://www.facebook.com/Asigra or our corporate site: www.asigra.com.
Appreciate the comment and best.
Zaid
I tested Asigra for a well-known UK company a number of years ago for remote site backups and found it to be a revelation that was ahead of its time and did what it said on the tin, just faster than anything else. At the time we were using TSM and Brightstor.
It is (or was) I guess aimed at individual users but is also flexible and configurable enough for enterprise environments, I am not surprised that they are doing well, a good solid and as far as I know still private company (no CEO with Limited responsibilities).
Good luck to them, a good team that deserves to do well.
Oh and i am not associated with Asigra in any way, but obviously like their product.
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