Symantec heads for the cloud with storage and back-up service Symantec had been winding this pitch for a while now, but the data security giant just lobbed a web-hosted storage and backup service of its very own into play. Once again Symantec faces off with EMC in a storage rivalry. This time it's the latest storage industry craze of charging customers monthly to have their data backed …
more like cloudcuckoopolis; Symanted ruined Veritas as a product years ago but still keep tarting it up to fool as a new bunch of muppets, just like they do with that retail Norton rubbish. Behind all the coroporate branding, there's very little there, old products with old technology that don't really work as they're supposed too but look friendly and are spammed all over the show.
Sales people from Veritas never let go (at least not until you tell the receptionist to not put them through and add them to you add them to your blocked senders list.)
Market leaders, my @rse.
Anyone who has tried upgrading from Symantec Anti-Virus 10 to 11 will tell you that Symantec royally ballsed it up. Lets hope they don't do the same to Backup Exec, I'm kinda fond of the old dog.
I'm all for backing up over the internet but I don't recommend it to my customers when a removable tape is still an option. The reason being that a bare-metal restore from an adsl line is going to take a hell of a lot longer than popping a tape in. Nice to see the technology maturing though, I'll hang on for that fibre to come up through my sewer.
Jobs, because no doubt in the near future he will hook time machine up to online storage and claim he invented online backups...unless he already has.
BackupExec is without a doubt the worst piece of software I have the misfortune of managing. It's so bad we gave up on the bugs being fixed and stopped renewing our maintenance contract. Instead we'll be putting the money to better use replacing the software later this year.
Their idea of creating backup to disk was to take their tape driver and bodge it to stream to disk. I'd never seen a file made up of 100,000 fragments before I tried that, let alone an entire disk full of them. And whoever thought it would be a good idea to make you browse through hundreds of files named "b2d00001" to find a restore needs their head examining. Their disk to disk to tape staging process is a joke too. Forget to insert a tape over a bank holiday? That's your backup to disk jobs stopped then, and you won't be able to run that tape backup again until you delete and re-create that policy.
Their compression is a joke too, our backups are currently running at a 0.7:1 compression ratio. That's right, it's somehow managing to give us negative compression on our backups. The majority of our backup jobs are now filling 100/200GB tapes with just 70GB of data. Curiously enough, Winzip manages to compress the same data down to around 15GB. A 6x improvement in compression, and we get nearer a 10x improvement in transfer rates by using Winzip too...
Internet backups are a great idea *if* the technology is well implemented. Having experienced BackupExec I can pretty much guarantee that won't be happening here.
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