back to article Are virtualisation and the cloud SNUFFING OUT traditional backup software?

Five years ago, you might have said that Symantec, EMC and other mainstream suppliers dominated the enterprise backup market with their products – Backup Exec, Net Backup, Networker, TSM and others. But this is no longer the case. Server virtualisation and the cloud have ripped gaping holes in the market and newer and smaller …

  1. Ken 16 Silver badge
    Holmes

    How do you recover?

    Where do you recover to?

    How long does data recovery take?

    How do your staff access?

    1. Smoking Gun

      Re: How do you recover?

      In respect to which product? The ones listed are all different.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How do you recover?

        The answers may well be different for different products, the questions need asking and answering before looking seriously at any of them.

        Here's perhaps another:

        Are these products/services conceptually similar to "RAID in the cloud" ie not really a backup at all, just an offsite mirror of the state of the files in the filesystem at some point in time? [RAID gives you two identical but useless sets of dodgy data if software or operator error leads to unintended deletion or corruption of files. You might or might not be surprised how many people think RAID is a form of backup, From the article it sounds like some people are thinking like that with virtualisation too?!]

        And another

        What if I want to recover a file that hasn't existed for 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Maybe the file got deleted, maybe the file got overwritten. I want it back, not from the time of the most recent full save (because the one I want wasn't on there), but from some unknown time before that.

        I know how to do this easily with the toy backups I use at home and the serious backups I used to use on real computers. I don't even know if I *can* do this (never mind how to do it) with the coverage I've seen of these shiny new 'recovery as a service' offerings etc.

        1. Danny 14

          Re: How do you recover?

          so how come it is killing the backup business, surely it should INCREASE the backup business? I mean, you still need software to backup to the cloud, you still need virtualised backup software to backup virtually. Plus what are the cloud services doing? Not backing up? They should be backing up your backups essentially - doubling the process by numbers (if not accessible by you).

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I presume the cloud providers are using the traditional backup software?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Nope...

      ...we use Asigra for our hosted backup solution and we do Veeam replication to our cloud as well since we're one of the largest Veeam resellers in our geographic area. People seem to like both products, the hosted solution is very inexpensive and works well for customers who have literally no capex - low monthly fee for an off-site backup which, in an absolute pinch, we can bring online in our own DC (customers with a single physical SBS server and no replication or redundancy, for example).

      Veeam sells like crazy and even though we can sell NetWorker and NetBackup, we tend to lead with Veeam where appropriate (all-virtual environments). The fact that Version 8 is integrated with Data Domain has actually helped drive interest around that product as well so there is some free cake for EMC here too (interop is good - who knew?).

      1. Zog_but_not_the_first
        Holmes

        Re: Nope...

        Yep. Nope.

      2. WoodstockWillie

        Re: Nope...

        Just to pile on, the article suggests that purchasing Veeam or similar is an either/or vs. the "big players". In my experience, this isn't true, at least for the larger shops. Rather, the niche tools are gap fillers where VMware support is subpar; TSM's being awful, as an example. In fact, I've come across several examples of Veeam "backups" being vacuumed up into the larger backup ecosystem as the final resting place. Efficient, that (not!).

  3. John 104

    Not Likely

    I'm backing up about 3 terabytes a week across multiple sites. Incrementals are, naturally, less. What isn't addressed in this article is the bandwidth to move that sort of data back and forth. I can clog my backup network all I want with my own traffic and no one cares. However, I'm not so sure it would be well received if I started chugging this data over the corp network on a daily basis...

    Also, I wonder, is it similar to an AWS type of tier where it is super cheap to put the data in, but a reaming to get it back out?

    1. Danny 14

      Re: Not Likely

      same here, 1tb of weekly full with 10s gb daily increment. I cannot put that sort of data over our internet link. Even if we virtualised our entire server and storage then that daily incremental will need to come over an internet link (which again wouldn't be fast enough).

      1. Philip Lewis

        Re: Not Likely

        Crikey, my compressed save sets are approaching 1TB a day on average ... and I limit my first tier recovery options to the past 15 days, simply in order to manage the storage space.

        Getting this data across the net to some cloudy end location while possible, is hardly a viable solution, especially when the inevitable recovery is necessary after SQL Server borks another multi-TB database.

  4. ssharwood

    Cloud will eat them all

    I reckon there's worse to come - consider Azure Site Recovery Manager. $50 a month to snapshot your VM into Azure and more or less instant failover if you go down on-premises. RPO depends on your appetite for bandwidth costs. VMware has this too. Scary.

  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Big Brother

    Just remember

    He who owns the data

    Owns you.

  6. Shannyla

    Veeam is brilliant, simple, fast and reliable. Backup Exec is an unreliable, over-complex, steaming pile of fresh horse manure.

    Our money went to Veeam and it hasn't let us down yet. First each backup set goes to disk, secondly it goes to tape and thirdly it goes offsite to a remote data centre. The first backup to disc uses network bandwidth so it happens at night, tape doesn't as it's backing up the local disk data, and the remote backup uses wan bandwidth so that also happens outside business hours.

    What's not to like? Maybe the fact that Veeam's sales department are super-aggressive and could do with dialling that back a bit.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Beware the snap your hand off sales

    I made an enquiry about Unitrends and was somewhat discouraged to see the emails from sales piling up before the virtual device had downloaded. I don't think I had a feedback survey for "your first three minutes of contact with Unitrends" but it was getting close.

    He's a the thing, if your product is good you don't need to chase customers that much, if your product has lots of competition, any one of which is an option you probably are going to jump on leads.

    As soon as I get tens of hits and follow ups in the first few minutes I assume the latter, never did install it. Is it any good?

  8. Joerg

    Business/corporate cloud backup is a fraud and a shame.

    All the cloud services to backup business data... what a fraud!

    Any serious business from the smallest ones to the largest should have their own LTO tape drives based backup system with a proper set of servers and high speed dedicated storage and network links.

    And no less than a double copy of each bit should exist. Better would be a triple copy. Then the tapes should be stored in a safe secured air conditioned place, one copy somewhere else anyway.

    1. Philip Lewis

      Re: Business/corporate cloud backup is a fraud and a shame.

      Joerg. True, but after one presents the bill for the hardware, software, human intervention time etc. it transpires that the stuff is not that valuable after all, and lesser solutions are acceptable. That is, until the shit hits the fan, at which time new jobs must be found.

  9. The Godfather

    rollox...!

    That's it then...bought by EMC soon...

  10. Ben Norris

    Currently highest tape sales ever, so no.

    http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/The-unstoppable-rise-of-tape-storage-continues/ba-p/180219#.VO8Zui7LJOi

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