Software & Services Advisor at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Integrator
2016-04-06T12:44:23Z
Apr 6, 2016
Hello, full disclosure, my background is on the consultant side... I've only had experience working with Veeam and AppAssure (now called "Rapid Recovery" but we can still call it AA) on your list (I've worked with a few outside of them as well), but never with ShadowProtect.
AppAssure - I am sure there are characteristics of an environment that make AppAssure a great fit for some; however, I worked with/around it at a few clients, none were 100% virtualized, I'd say it was closer to 70/30 (virt/phys) each on VMware. One had 3 sites, the other had I believe 9, I don't recall how many offices the 3rd had. Notably these customers were "Dell shops" and chose AppAssure mostly because it was another Dell product (against my recommendation). It was extremely problematic, inconsistent restores, Dell services (now sold to NTT) helped set it up so it was following all "best practices" and there were still consistent issues after a complex install. 2 of the 3 replaced it within 2 years of purchase/install.
Veeam - I've worked with Veeam for nearly 7 years, when they were a small startup, early on they were not a great fit for multiple sites or "larger" environments, that resulted at that time in one unhappy customer. Since then the product has matured and I've worked with Veeam in many customers, some with more than 20 branch locations, multiple datacenters, cloud, tape, etc and the set-up in those environments are not easy, but it works and is consistent and reliable. The hold-back for a lot of customers had been that they do not support physical for those one or two servers left behind; however, they either just released or are about to release support for physical server backup. I'll also note that customers had positive support experiences in both presales and post sales. (PS- their price list is changing and is going up in May I believe, if you are on the fence, factor your timing into cost)
I don't know the size of your environment, I would say scale is not an issue for either product, as I look at ShadowProtect, my initial opinion is that I would not "bet my business" on it. I also don't see anything about application consistent snapshots/backups from shadowprotect for anything besides Microsoft apps. So if you have any Oracle, Linux servers, or plan on implementing a hybrid-IT infrastructure in the coming years, it doesn't appear to have that flexibility. Again, this is just from some quick reading through their website.
Personally, I would also consider all the volatility around Dell at the moment. They no longer have a pro-services division. And with EMC's Avamar being a more stable product, I would not be surprised to see an AppaSure sunset date in the coming year or two... so extended supportability may be a factor.
Licensing on all seem to be pretty much the same... Veeam is per cpu, AppAssure is per agent (but has a capacity based license similar to CommVault). I would still centralize my license managment across windows, hypervisor and backup/DR tool within a software asset management tool like pyracloud or something. I believe Veeam can feed into your SIEM if you have one, not sure about AA. If you are a VMware shop their integration is extremely tight, a lot of the same language and workflows make learning curves shorter.
Best of luck!
Search for a product comparison in Backup and Recovery
Well before deciding the backup solution for your environment, you have to provide below information about your environment,
1) you have physical or virtual or both types of servers?
2) what are the applications to be backed up?
3) what is your current backup media, i.e. tapes, storage or NAS?
4) What is your desired RTO/RPO?
5) What is the size of your data?
6) What is the growth rate of your data?
7) what sort of functionalities you need from backup?
only then can i suggest you a solution suitable to your environment.
Sr. Commercial Account Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2016-04-06T15:25:40Z
Apr 6, 2016
We have been selling primarily VEEAM for multi-vendor backup platforms. Customers have been very happy with VEEAM for a Vmware environment. Utilizing it for backup and offsite replication in some cases. Works well with HP, IBM, EMC, etc.
I don’t really have a comparison to AppAssure or Shadowprotect. We have not really delved into those products.
VEEAM has been a solid platform for many of our customers.
President and Chief Consultant with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2016-04-06T14:59:16Z
Apr 6, 2016
Edd,
You have asked for opinions on backup products without providing any of your requirements. All of these products are good within certain circumstances, all of them have a cost model. What I and anyone else that would help you on a consultative bases would need are:
1) What is your current infrastructure look like? How many clients do you have, are they all virtual or are there physical servers that need to be backed up as well?
2) What is your current backup platform? Where is it falling short?
3) What is your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO / RPO)?
4) What applications in your environment do you need to backup?
5) What are the I/O rates?
6) Are you going to be replicating to a secondary site for site level protection?
7) How are your data stores configured, are they set up to optimally take advantage of a VEEM or like software?
8) What are your current data sizes and what is your daily data growth?
9) Are you using encryption at rest?
Those would be my initial questions. Providing an opinion on whether VEEM or the other products is better in any context other than specific to your requirements and needs is just an opinion and NOT some thing you should be using to make a purchasing decision.
IT Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2016-04-06T13:47:44Z
Apr 6, 2016
Veeam is a great product line. We have been a customer for the past three years. This product helped us get through a major Disaster Event where our Data Center was entirely inoperable and we needed to restore across town to a different DataCenter to restore HealthCare Services to our customers. There have been many other smaller incidents as well for typical day to day events. Also they are pushing the tech further with improvements and additions such as Endpoint Protection and Azure Replicas and Restores. It is worth the investment to secure your most important assets.
1 - Technical
As Sigurd mentioned above, have you been able to test out the three offerings you've mentioned in your own environment? As you mentioned that you're close to making a decision, I assume you've been given the usual dog and pony shows including live demos, but it's always helpful to be able to test out a BU solution with your own data, even for a limited time. For instance, we offer a 30 day trial of Asigra's agentless software (don't know if you've considered that as an option): www.armadacloud.com . Have you been able to play around with any of the options to fully test out a data recovery scenario?
2 - Financial
Again, you're pretty far down the path, so I'm sure you've fully delved into the intricacies of how each provider bills (billed on compressed/uncompressed data size, # of restores, flat rate, add'l cost for onsite appliance?).
3 - Support
This is another important piece - are you looking for something you can own (learn the solution inside and out and be completely responsible for) or are you seeking a partner who can provide guidance in the installation, configuration, and ongoing maintenance of your data protection platform? If the latter, see point #2: are there additional fees for support?
As has been noted above, to give a thorough recommendation one would need some more information on your specific environment, but happy to help if you're looking for a partner.
Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-04-06T12:15:49Z
Apr 6, 2016
If Veeam is an option, then the environment is probably 100% Vmware. Consider VMexplorer (from Trilead, recently acquired by HP) as this is about a third the cost for the same functionality.
If the environment is a mixture of virtual and non-virtual, then consider HPe Data Protector and fiddle around with pricing options with your channel partner to see what you can get.
Also: seriously consider open source solutions (e.g. bacula or bareos) because of the "lifetime" effect. If you decide you don't like a commercial backup product, you will probably still need to keep it for the next 7 years in order to recover backups from old tapes kept for legal archive reasons. This can be expensive and tedious from commercial products, and fairly painless for open source ones.
DataCentre, Managed Services and Cloud Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-04-06T11:58:20Z
Apr 6, 2016
I agree Martin. Really need to know the site configuration to give you the best advice, each solution has its pros and cons. Personally I would avoid shadow protect its not a backup product it's an image solution, Veeam and app assure are proper backup. Solutions. Don't beleive shadow protect sales talk. It's imaging software only with extras and paid addons to do specific restores. If you want true granular recovery then Veeam for virtual machines is the best out there.
Depends on what you would like to backup / restore. Depends on virtual vs physical environment. Veeam is an excellent backup tool for virtual environments. It is easy to setup. Restoring Files / VM's / SQL/ Exchange / AD is easy and fast. Surebackup needs a little more time to setup but is a must have to validate your critcal VM's. We are not using the WAN accelarator.
We did check out Dell Appssure as well (coming from the physical backup world) which seems a nice software if you have a mixed environment (physical and virtual). However when we were evaluating the product, it were Dell's tech people who were lacking the initiative and knowledge to setup our demo environment.
It is worth noting that Veeam is a built for virtualisation agentless technology which works at the hypervisor layer, while both appassure and shadowprotect are agent based, and therefore carry a management overhead which may be significant depending on the size of the environment to be protected.
If the environment is entirely virtualised, Veeam is probably the way to go. If it is not, Veeam should be ignored; while there is an end point backup feature, it is a recent addition to their functionality and relatively untested.
Between appassure and shadowprotect I would say the decision is commercial. Have the user define their required RPO and RTO then approach consultants for these technologies and seek commercial proposals.
If I may muddy the waters slightly, in my opinion it is worth including the arcserve UDP backup product in the discussion – it has both agentless and agent based deployment models, a great GUI and is competitively priced.
Infrastructure Senior Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Real User
2016-04-06T11:14:59Z
Apr 6, 2016
Hello,
I am talking about my experience with Veeam software. It is amazing if you are looking for a backup solutions for virtual environment based on VMware or Hyper-V.
Hi, the only advise I can give is that you should test out the backup solutions your looking at.
I can say that Veeam is an excellent backup solution for virtualized environments whether its VMware or Hyper-V. With the build in validation of the backups your good to go for internal reviews and fulfill the IT backup and security policies.
Systems Admin at a wholesaler/distributor with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
2016-04-06T11:10:22Z
Apr 6, 2016
Without knowing the configuration of the systems to be backed up, it would be difficult to give pros and cons to the different solutions. Virtual or Physical, how much data, what type of data, what type of storage are you backing up to, do you need this data replicated off site, etc.?
Sales Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
2016-04-08T12:12:38Z
Apr 8, 2016
This is a question that has multiple answers. All of the comments seems to be spot on. However, I believe the question is focused on Features and Benefits. Unless there is a broader scope to account for i.e.: Fully vs. Partially virtualized, raw data amount being back up, disc and or tape, current dedupe ratio, RPO/RTO and what storage devices...HPE, Dell, EMC, etc. You are left with a bake off that may not serve your needs.
The question you should be asking is, "What problem am I trying to solve". How flexible will I need my solution to be relative my Dynamic Environment. Being a Sales Consultant my conversations are based on solving a need first. Between the three solutions there lies the comparative question. Which will solve your "High Valued Challenges Quicker and Better".
Harvey Wooten
Information Management and Governance
Big Data Solutions
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Senior Technical Officer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-04-08T08:11:25Z
Apr 8, 2016
I have not used or tested Dell AppAssure and don't know anything about it.
Veeam is only good for a virtual environment. Last I checked, which was a
while ago, they don't have any solution for a physical environment.
ShadowProtect worked well on a demo by their own people but when I tried to
test it on my test environment, it was not suitable. It was a while back so
I can't remember the specifics.
In the end, if you have enough budget you need a solution that can protect
both the physical and virtual environment.
If a product can be successfully tested to be able to recover some
complicated servers in a timely and simple manner then that is the one to
use.
If you read into using Replication vs Backup, for backup solutions, both are not exactly the same.
Veeam - I am not so sure on Veeam but heard that its a good software for replication of VMs over WAN.
Shadow Protect - It provides bare metal backup, up to sector level. In order to reduce the network traffic load, this software is able to replicate only sectors with changes, no need to replicate the whole image. And the replication is through SFTP. Since it uses small packets to replicate over, you should be able to save some costs in subscribing lower bandwidth lines.
Other costs to consider in Shadow Protect:
1) SFTP subscription
2) Needed to have a physical host to house all your images. Physical host in DR site to be considered as well.
How it works:
Production Servers with Shadow Protect installed --> Backup sector changes to a physical host --> Physical host replicate this change over the WAN via SFTP to your DR site physical host as a safekeep. --> The host at the DR site can then run the image using VM emulators like "Box".
I can recommend Veeam, recently
I been working with that solution and for me I think have an strong
integration with Virtualization platforms as VMware, the level of
compression is really good and the time spend in backups or restores is
significant.
Veeam is definitely "enterprise" unless you have a narrow definition of the term. We have a pretty large environment that includes multiple sites and WAN links so we needed a solutuion that also solved that part of the problem. The problem we found with some of the traditional backup products (Commvualt, BackupExec, etc) was that the VM specific parts at the time we were evaluating them seemed more of an afterthought and they were difficult to use (we have non-IT users that handle restores in some of our areas). Since we are 99% virtualized, we did not need or want a "traditional" enterprise backup product but rather one that was specifically designed for virtual environments. With Veeam, it turns out to have moved now into the traditional backup space as well so we can drop the few non Veeam physical backups leaving a single product.
Consider VembuBDR also. On cost effecvive and good support software Vembu winning all the ods.
It supports all the features that are available in the listed products.
Supports various brands of SAN
Comprehensive support and monitoring your backup jobs
VMWare Failover and Failback
IP Remapping
Network Remapping etc..
Guidance from reviewer85722 is very good. It is pragmatic and on the dot.
Adding to it, if you have vSphere hosting 1000+VMs and 90% of these VMs need snapshot backup, then your vSphere design has to be built with prestressed material to run the load of 900+ VMs snapshot backup. For this you need to :
1) Build separate vCenter in Compute & Management cluster to do snapshot backup from 6pm to 4am.
2) Keep 20% breathing space on this vCenters.
3) Upgrade to latest vCenter where all snapshot issues are fixed.
4) Increase stack thread & wrapper sizes on vCenter
5) Upgrade ESXi hosts to latest version which have fixed all known snapshot issues.
6) Install & upgrade your backup solutions that has fixed all known issues especially related to virtual world.
7) Use good FC storage with high IOPs. Don't load storage beyond 80%
Same goes for Hyper-V. Checkout which backup products works best with vSphere & Hyper-V
Information Protection Architect for APJ Region at Veritas Technologies LLC
Real User
2016-04-07T01:16:31Z
Apr 7, 2016
The wrong way around is to compare products and features to select what suits best.
What suits best should be based on what problem we are solving. So I'd ask to know a bit more of the problem statement that the customer is dealing with, their environment and what its made of and direction they are heading to identify what might complement them for the future to help them determine what suits best.
Each of the mentioned have a niche they are best suited for. I'd argue that each of them are not enterprise ready in that, unless the environment is specific and limited, they may not be for the long haul or all encompassing.
Yes the best product may not be the cheapest. But the cheapest may be the most painful to maintain and operate as well.
I have used all the main virtualization-aware backup products and I can't say enough good things about Veeam. It is astounding for VM backups, file level restores and now backups physical systems to the same environment. I've used their lab functionality where you can stand up an environment based on backups. It also does compression on the fly as well as encryption and deduplication.
We started using the Universal Object restore to restore Exchange, SharePoint and SQL. It handles log truncation just fine and now handles Oracle DB.
If you get the Enterprise version it comes with VeeamONE monitoring which also has tight integration with Veeam Backup and Replication.
Anyways I know I sound like a fan boy but the product is just plain great.
Supervisor, *IX & DBA Teams with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2016-04-06T22:16:09Z
Apr 6, 2016
It is difficult to provide detailed advice w/o knowing the environment for which the backup software is needed. I come from a background where the backup software has to be capable of backing up:
- Physical as well as virtual servers.
- MS Windows and Linux, UNIX (HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc.) servers
- CIFS file shares on NAS devices
- Oracle and SQL Server databases on various operating systems and servers.
So to the best of my knowledge, here are some brief general thoughts as I do not have experience with VEEAM, AppAssure, or with Shadowprotect.
I may be doing these software an injustice as I am not really familiar with them so please talk with the vendor as well. (I work in a Symantec NetBackup shop so I cannot legitimately compare the backup products in question).
1. Shadowprotect appears to be a Windows only backup solution w/o VM capabilities. If you are budget constrained and looking for a Windows only backup solution then Shadowprotect may serve your needs. It does not appear to have any advanced capabilities in terms of backup and restore on the VM side so if you have a lot of Windows VMs, you may want to evaluate it’s capabilities in the VM area. It also does not appear to have any special capabilities to backup NAS devices that present themselves as Windows file shares.
2. If you care about Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, VEEAM and Dell both have a sufficient enterprise presence to be included in it while shadowprotect is a smaller player that is not mentioned in the Gartner MQ.
3. VEEAM specializes in all kinds of backups if your environment is strictly VMs (VMware as well as Hyper-V) and it is well thought of in the area of VM backups. It has recently branched out into carrying out physical machine backups but this is a very recent development and I have no idea how well it would do this.
4. Dell AppAssure is capable of both physical and VM backups. However VEEAM is generally thought of as having “better” VM backup capabilities and features while AppAssure has a better track record of backing up physical servers.
5. For all three backup software, you may want to know their capabilities in the areas of:
a. hot and cold database backups and availability of drivers for Oracle, SQL Server, etc.
b. licensing methods (by server/device count, capacity licensing by Terabytes, or a combination of both as this will determine how much you will pay for purchase as well as for ongoing annual maintenance.
c. Availability of backup drivers for VM environments, integration with VM management consoles.
d. Ability to carry out bare metal restore in a DR situation.
e. Many organizations want reporting capabilities that will allow management to see how much is being backed up, what is being backed up, the speed of backups so as to determine backup windows at night, etc.
f. Being able to carry out some pilot testing of the backup software is always very helpful.
6. Other factors relevant to your environment.
IT Senior System Engineer, Data Integrity and IT Pharma Automation systems migration consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2016-04-06T20:45:26Z
Apr 6, 2016
Good evening,
if you want to decide backup products obviously depends on your infrastructure and relative target..
In any case, about client (it could be partially extended to server too) I would suggest to review GPO/scripting utilizing real time client backup with robocopy/hobocopy (VSS free backup tool).
Supervisor, *IX & DBA Teams with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2016-04-06T19:04:00Z
Apr 6, 2016
It is difficult to provide detailed advice w/o knowing the environment for which the backup software is needed. I come from a background where the backup software has to be capable of backing up:
- Physical as well as virtual servers.
- MS Windows and Linux, UNIX (HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc.) servers
- CIFS file shares on NAS devices
- Oracle and SQL Server databases on various operating systems and servers.
So to the best of my knowledge, here are some brief general thoughts as I do not have experience with VEEAM, AppAssure, or with Shadowprotect.
I may be doing these software an injustice as I am not really familiar with them so please talk with the vendor as well. (I work in a Symantec NetBackup shop so I cannot legitimately compare the backup products in question).
1. Shadowprotect appears to be a Windows only backup solution w/o VM capabilities. If you are budget constrained and looking for a Windows only backup solution then Shadowprotect may serve your needs. It does not appear to have any advanced capabilities in terms of backup and restore on the VM side so if you have a lot of Windows VMs, you may want to evaluate it’s capabilities in the VM area. It also does not appear to have any special capabilities to backup NAS devices that present themselves as Windows file shares.
2. If you care about Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, VEEAM and Dell both have a sufficient enterprise presence to be included in it while shadowprotect is a smaller player that is not mentioned in the Gartner MQ.
3. VEEAM specializes in all kinds of backups if your environment is strictly VMs (VMware as well as Hyper-V) and it is well thought of in the area of VM backups. It has recently branched out into carrying out physical machine backups but this is a very recent development and I have no idea how well it would do this.
4. Dell AppAssure is capable of both physical and VM backups. However VEEAM is generally thought of as having “better” VM backup capabilities and features while AppAssure has a better track record of backing up physical servers.
5. For all three backup software, you may want to know their capabilities in the areas of:
a. hot and cold database backups and availability of drivers for Oracle, SQL Server, etc.
b. licensing methods (by server/device count, capacity licensing by Terabytes, or a combination of both as this will determine how much you will pay for purchase as well as for ongoing annual maintenance.
c. Availability of backup drivers for VM environments, integration with VM environments.
d. Ability to carry out bare metal restore in a DR situation.
e. Many organizations want reporting capabilities that will allow management to see how much is being backed up, what is being backed up, the speed of backups so as to determine backup windows at night, etc.
f. Being able to carry out some pilot testing of the backup software is always very helpful.
First off, pleasure to meet you virtually. I actively work with all three of these products. All of these manufactures are reputable however, they have specific differences when considering backup. Three questions that come up...
1. How much are you backing up?
2. How often are you backing up (nightly, weekly, etc.)?
3. How virtualized is your environment?
Without answering these questions its hard to make a solid recomendation.
Independent Analyst and Advisory Consultant at Server StorageIO - www.storageio.com
Consultant
Top 20
2016-04-06T14:59:50Z
Apr 6, 2016
Assuming this is not a seed question (e.g. its a legitimate request for info/insight ;) vs one to stimulate discussion around the three vendors mentioned, How about some more info and context as to what you are looking for including your needs, environment requirements?
Do you need just protection for virtual or also for physical, if also physical, are those servers or end point/clients?
What hypervisors, vmware, hyper-v, kvm, xen or others?
what operating systems, how many, how much storage, what applications and plugins?
will you be needing to send a copy of, or replicate data off-site or to another location?
how much data changes per day, what type of protection granularity do you need for your different applications RTO, RPO and service requirements?
What do you currently have for backup/data protection, what do you like or dislike, issues, problems, or wishlist?
How much budget do you have, do you need to use existing hardware and or software licenses?
Have your done a proof of concept with the products you mentioned or others, are you planning on doing a POC or simply look at speeds, feeds, specs and price or who has the best giveaways? ;)...
How about some more info and people can provide more insight...
Senior Systems Support Analyst at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
2016-04-06T13:42:59Z
Apr 6, 2016
I have not had experience with Dell App Assure but I have had great experience with Veeam and with Shadow Protect.
I have been using Veeam for almost 7 years with our VSphere Farm and now HyperV. The product is very strong in its abilities to do full, incremental, and file level restores. It has saved us several times and I can’t begin to recommend it enough.
As for ShadowProtect, it is another great product that we have used on our most critical physical servers to do bare metal restores when upgrades or patching has unexpectedly gone wrong.
Well if you have a mixed environment of virtual and physical and want
one product then Veeam would be out of the question.
ShadowProtect can offer socket based pricing on Virtual that is
competitive to Veeam. Also have some new functionality for automating
the testing of backups coming out. If you are talking with anyone at
StorageCraft I would ask them about it. ShadowProtect does require an
agent to be installed. They install a low level driver that helps in
capturing a better backup. It also allows them to be able to restore
that image back to any platform virtual or physical. Virtual boot for
testing and a temporary fail over is a great feature
Dell AppAssure one thing that is concerning is what is it's future
with Dell? With the purchase of EMC will it be sold off to help in
paying for the EMC purchase? Also you are tied to the AppAssure
console. Almost anything that is done with the backup images has to
be done within the console.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Vendor
2016-04-06T12:57:18Z
Apr 6, 2016
Sorry, I don't know two of those applications, I only know a little about
veeam. I can only give general guidance.
As always with these things, you have to decide what your requirements are,
and their relative priority and importance. Check those against the
respective products and road maps to see how they align. I know I'm being
Captain Obvious but since you didn't include any of your requirements in
the email, I thought it worth mentioning.
So for example,
How big are your data sets?
Do the products do incremental backups? How are they implemented?
Do you want a UI or a CLI ?
Integration with logging tools?
VMware, Microsoft or both?
See how each program performs against your requirements and then decide.
I'm sorry to report I've only personally used Avamar backups for the past several years and it does work really well for virtualized and non-virtualized systems.
I've heard really good things about Veeam in virtual environments but I don't have any experience with the other two products.
I would recommend a POC – have the vendor provide you the solution to test it out on site. We are currently having a client evaluate a Unitrends solution in this manner. It provides them ample time to test and determine the pros and cons in a real world situation. All products listed have advantages and disadvantages. Without knowing the environment it is tough to advise on the best selection.
It is very critical to take backup of your system on an on-going basis.
1. Pybackpack
This has a very simple and intutive user interface. This has the following two tabs:
Backup: Specify the backupset name, and the backup destination. You can also specify a remote server where the backup can be stored via SSH. From the backup tab, you can also launch the backupset editor, where you can specify the backupset name, description, the files and folders that needs to be included or excluded from the backup.
Restore: Select the backup location from where you like to restore, and the backupset name.
# apt-cache search pyback
pybackpack - user friendly file backup tool for GNOME
# sudo apt-get install pybackpack
# pybackpack
Read more: Backup Your Files/Folders on Ubuntu Desktop using Pybackpack GUI Tool
www.thegeekstuff.com
3. Backerupper
Backerupper is a straight forward backup program that takes backup of the directories that you specify. Apart from placing the backup on the system, you can also copy the backup to some other location on your local network.
Data backup involves copying and moving data from its primary location to a secondary location from which it can later be retrieved in case the primary data storage location experiences some kind of failure or disaster.
Hello, full disclosure, my background is on the consultant side... I've only had experience working with Veeam and AppAssure (now called "Rapid Recovery" but we can still call it AA) on your list (I've worked with a few outside of them as well), but never with ShadowProtect.
AppAssure - I am sure there are characteristics of an environment that make AppAssure a great fit for some; however, I worked with/around it at a few clients, none were 100% virtualized, I'd say it was closer to 70/30 (virt/phys) each on VMware. One had 3 sites, the other had I believe 9, I don't recall how many offices the 3rd had. Notably these customers were "Dell shops" and chose AppAssure mostly because it was another Dell product (against my recommendation). It was extremely problematic, inconsistent restores, Dell services (now sold to NTT) helped set it up so it was following all "best practices" and there were still consistent issues after a complex install. 2 of the 3 replaced it within 2 years of purchase/install.
Veeam - I've worked with Veeam for nearly 7 years, when they were a small startup, early on they were not a great fit for multiple sites or "larger" environments, that resulted at that time in one unhappy customer. Since then the product has matured and I've worked with Veeam in many customers, some with more than 20 branch locations, multiple datacenters, cloud, tape, etc and the set-up in those environments are not easy, but it works and is consistent and reliable. The hold-back for a lot of customers had been that they do not support physical for those one or two servers left behind; however, they either just released or are about to release support for physical server backup. I'll also note that customers had positive support experiences in both presales and post sales. (PS- their price list is changing and is going up in May I believe, if you are on the fence, factor your timing into cost)
I don't know the size of your environment, I would say scale is not an issue for either product, as I look at ShadowProtect, my initial opinion is that I would not "bet my business" on it. I also don't see anything about application consistent snapshots/backups from shadowprotect for anything besides Microsoft apps. So if you have any Oracle, Linux servers, or plan on implementing a hybrid-IT infrastructure in the coming years, it doesn't appear to have that flexibility. Again, this is just from some quick reading through their website.
Personally, I would also consider all the volatility around Dell at the moment. They no longer have a pro-services division. And with EMC's Avamar being a more stable product, I would not be surprised to see an AppaSure sunset date in the coming year or two... so extended supportability may be a factor.
Licensing on all seem to be pretty much the same... Veeam is per cpu, AppAssure is per agent (but has a capacity based license similar to CommVault). I would still centralize my license managment across windows, hypervisor and backup/DR tool within a software asset management tool like pyracloud or something. I believe Veeam can feed into your SIEM if you have one, not sure about AA. If you are a VMware shop their integration is extremely tight, a lot of the same language and workflows make learning curves shorter.
Best of luck!
Well before deciding the backup solution for your environment, you have to provide below information about your environment,
1) you have physical or virtual or both types of servers?
2) what are the applications to be backed up?
3) what is your current backup media, i.e. tapes, storage or NAS?
4) What is your desired RTO/RPO?
5) What is the size of your data?
6) What is the growth rate of your data?
7) what sort of functionalities you need from backup?
only then can i suggest you a solution suitable to your environment.
We have been selling primarily VEEAM for multi-vendor backup platforms. Customers have been very happy with VEEAM for a Vmware environment. Utilizing it for backup and offsite replication in some cases. Works well with HP, IBM, EMC, etc.
I don’t really have a comparison to AppAssure or Shadowprotect. We have not really delved into those products.
VEEAM has been a solid platform for many of our customers.
Edd,
You have asked for opinions on backup products without providing any of your requirements. All of these products are good within certain circumstances, all of them have a cost model. What I and anyone else that would help you on a consultative bases would need are:
1) What is your current infrastructure look like? How many clients do you have, are they all virtual or are there physical servers that need to be backed up as well?
2) What is your current backup platform? Where is it falling short?
3) What is your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO / RPO)?
4) What applications in your environment do you need to backup?
5) What are the I/O rates?
6) Are you going to be replicating to a secondary site for site level protection?
7) How are your data stores configured, are they set up to optimally take advantage of a VEEM or like software?
8) What are your current data sizes and what is your daily data growth?
9) Are you using encryption at rest?
Those would be my initial questions. Providing an opinion on whether VEEM or the other products is better in any context other than specific to your requirements and needs is just an opinion and NOT some thing you should be using to make a purchasing decision.
Veeam is a great product line. We have been a customer for the past three years. This product helped us get through a major Disaster Event where our Data Center was entirely inoperable and we needed to restore across town to a different DataCenter to restore HealthCare Services to our customers. There have been many other smaller incidents as well for typical day to day events. Also they are pushing the tech further with improvements and additions such as Endpoint Protection and Azure Replicas and Restores. It is worth the investment to secure your most important assets.
3 points to consider from my POV:
1 - Technical
As Sigurd mentioned above, have you been able to test out the three offerings you've mentioned in your own environment? As you mentioned that you're close to making a decision, I assume you've been given the usual dog and pony shows including live demos, but it's always helpful to be able to test out a BU solution with your own data, even for a limited time. For instance, we offer a 30 day trial of Asigra's agentless software (don't know if you've considered that as an option): www.armadacloud.com . Have you been able to play around with any of the options to fully test out a data recovery scenario?
2 - Financial
Again, you're pretty far down the path, so I'm sure you've fully delved into the intricacies of how each provider bills (billed on compressed/uncompressed data size, # of restores, flat rate, add'l cost for onsite appliance?).
3 - Support
This is another important piece - are you looking for something you can own (learn the solution inside and out and be completely responsible for) or are you seeking a partner who can provide guidance in the installation, configuration, and ongoing maintenance of your data protection platform? If the latter, see point #2: are there additional fees for support?
As has been noted above, to give a thorough recommendation one would need some more information on your specific environment, but happy to help if you're looking for a partner.
If Veeam is an option, then the environment is probably 100% Vmware. Consider VMexplorer (from Trilead, recently acquired by HP) as this is about a third the cost for the same functionality.
If the environment is a mixture of virtual and non-virtual, then consider HPe Data Protector and fiddle around with pricing options with your channel partner to see what you can get.
Also: seriously consider open source solutions (e.g. bacula or bareos) because of the "lifetime" effect. If you decide you don't like a commercial backup product, you will probably still need to keep it for the next 7 years in order to recover backups from old tapes kept for legal archive reasons. This can be expensive and tedious from commercial products, and fairly painless for open source ones.
I agree Martin. Really need to know the site configuration to give you the best advice, each solution has its pros and cons. Personally I would avoid shadow protect its not a backup product it's an image solution, Veeam and app assure are proper backup. Solutions. Don't beleive shadow protect sales talk. It's imaging software only with extras and paid addons to do specific restores. If you want true granular recovery then Veeam for virtual machines is the best out there.
Depends on what you would like to backup / restore. Depends on virtual vs physical environment. Veeam is an excellent backup tool for virtual environments. It is easy to setup. Restoring Files / VM's / SQL/ Exchange / AD is easy and fast. Surebackup needs a little more time to setup but is a must have to validate your critcal VM's. We are not using the WAN accelarator.
We did check out Dell Appssure as well (coming from the physical backup world) which seems a nice software if you have a mixed environment (physical and virtual). However when we were evaluating the product, it were Dell's tech people who were lacking the initiative and knowledge to setup our demo environment.
All three products are established and reliable.
It is worth noting that Veeam is a built for virtualisation agentless technology which works at the hypervisor layer, while both appassure and shadowprotect are agent based, and therefore carry a management overhead which may be significant depending on the size of the environment to be protected.
If the environment is entirely virtualised, Veeam is probably the way to go. If it is not, Veeam should be ignored; while there is an end point backup feature, it is a recent addition to their functionality and relatively untested.
Between appassure and shadowprotect I would say the decision is commercial. Have the user define their required RPO and RTO then approach consultants for these technologies and seek commercial proposals.
If I may muddy the waters slightly, in my opinion it is worth including the arcserve UDP backup product in the discussion – it has both agentless and agent based deployment models, a great GUI and is competitively priced.
Good luck!
I can advise you that it very depend what you what to achieved form the restore process.
only VMware machine restore / mount? application ( SQL / Oracle ) restore / mount instance restore?
I am using Actifio Data Protection Solution that give a great solution for all of the above and many more.
Hello,
I am talking about my experience with Veeam software. It is amazing if you are looking for a backup solutions for virtual environment based on VMware or Hyper-V.
Hi, the only advise I can give is that you should test out the backup solutions your looking at.
I can say that Veeam is an excellent backup solution for virtualized environments whether its VMware or Hyper-V. With the build in validation of the backups your good to go for internal reviews and fulfill the IT backup and security policies.
It really does depends on what you are backing up.
Without knowing the configuration of the systems to be backed up, it would be difficult to give pros and cons to the different solutions. Virtual or Physical, how much data, what type of data, what type of storage are you backing up to, do you need this data replicated off site, etc.?
I'm sorry but i don't know any of these applications. But I can tell you
that I use Virtos SOS Backup software and this is the best for me.
Take a look at www.virtos.com. You will find information there.
This is a question that has multiple answers. All of the comments seems to be spot on. However, I believe the question is focused on Features and Benefits. Unless there is a broader scope to account for i.e.: Fully vs. Partially virtualized, raw data amount being back up, disc and or tape, current dedupe ratio, RPO/RTO and what storage devices...HPE, Dell, EMC, etc. You are left with a bake off that may not serve your needs.
The question you should be asking is, "What problem am I trying to solve". How flexible will I need my solution to be relative my Dynamic Environment. Being a Sales Consultant my conversations are based on solving a need first. Between the three solutions there lies the comparative question. Which will solve your "High Valued Challenges Quicker and Better".
Harvey Wooten
Information Management and Governance
Big Data Solutions
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
I have not used or tested Dell AppAssure and don't know anything about it.
Veeam is only good for a virtual environment. Last I checked, which was a
while ago, they don't have any solution for a physical environment.
ShadowProtect worked well on a demo by their own people but when I tried to
test it on my test environment, it was not suitable. It was a while back so
I can't remember the specifics.
In the end, if you have enough budget you need a solution that can protect
both the physical and virtual environment.
If a product can be successfully tested to be able to recover some
complicated servers in a timely and simple manner then that is the one to
use.
Hi, let me try to contribute on what i know.
If you read into using Replication vs Backup, for backup solutions, both are not exactly the same.
Veeam - I am not so sure on Veeam but heard that its a good software for replication of VMs over WAN.
Shadow Protect - It provides bare metal backup, up to sector level. In order to reduce the network traffic load, this software is able to replicate only sectors with changes, no need to replicate the whole image. And the replication is through SFTP. Since it uses small packets to replicate over, you should be able to save some costs in subscribing lower bandwidth lines.
Other costs to consider in Shadow Protect:
1) SFTP subscription
2) Needed to have a physical host to house all your images. Physical host in DR site to be considered as well.
How it works:
Production Servers with Shadow Protect installed --> Backup sector changes to a physical host --> Physical host replicate this change over the WAN via SFTP to your DR site physical host as a safekeep. --> The host at the DR site can then run the image using VM emulators like "Box".
I’m sorry not be able to help, because I am using Altaro VM backup and have all my servers virtualised with out-site replication.
As I'm managing Veeam, I would defenetly recomand it to you.
If you have a soecific question I can help you to clear them.
I can recommend Veeam, recently
I been working with that solution and for me I think have an strong
integration with Virtualization platforms as VMware, the level of
compression is really good and the time spend in backups or restores is
significant.
Veeam is definitely "enterprise" unless you have a narrow definition of the term. We have a pretty large environment that includes multiple sites and WAN links so we needed a solutuion that also solved that part of the problem. The problem we found with some of the traditional backup products (Commvualt, BackupExec, etc) was that the VM specific parts at the time we were evaluating them seemed more of an afterthought and they were difficult to use (we have non-IT users that handle restores in some of our areas). Since we are 99% virtualized, we did not need or want a "traditional" enterprise backup product but rather one that was specifically designed for virtual environments. With Veeam, it turns out to have moved now into the traditional backup space as well so we can drop the few non Veeam physical backups leaving a single product.
Consider VembuBDR also. On cost effecvive and good support software Vembu winning all the ods.
It supports all the features that are available in the listed products.
Supports various brands of SAN
Comprehensive support and monitoring your backup jobs
VMWare Failover and Failback
IP Remapping
Network Remapping etc..
Guidance from reviewer85722 is very good. It is pragmatic and on the dot.
Adding to it, if you have vSphere hosting 1000+VMs and 90% of these VMs need snapshot backup, then your vSphere design has to be built with prestressed material to run the load of 900+ VMs snapshot backup. For this you need to :
1) Build separate vCenter in Compute & Management cluster to do snapshot backup from 6pm to 4am.
2) Keep 20% breathing space on this vCenters.
3) Upgrade to latest vCenter where all snapshot issues are fixed.
4) Increase stack thread & wrapper sizes on vCenter
5) Upgrade ESXi hosts to latest version which have fixed all known snapshot issues.
6) Install & upgrade your backup solutions that has fixed all known issues especially related to virtual world.
7) Use good FC storage with high IOPs. Don't load storage beyond 80%
Same goes for Hyper-V. Checkout which backup products works best with vSphere & Hyper-V
The wrong way around is to compare products and features to select what suits best.
What suits best should be based on what problem we are solving. So I'd ask to know a bit more of the problem statement that the customer is dealing with, their environment and what its made of and direction they are heading to identify what might complement them for the future to help them determine what suits best.
Each of the mentioned have a niche they are best suited for. I'd argue that each of them are not enterprise ready in that, unless the environment is specific and limited, they may not be for the long haul or all encompassing.
Yes the best product may not be the cheapest. But the cheapest may be the most painful to maintain and operate as well.
I have used all the main virtualization-aware backup products and I can't say enough good things about Veeam. It is astounding for VM backups, file level restores and now backups physical systems to the same environment. I've used their lab functionality where you can stand up an environment based on backups. It also does compression on the fly as well as encryption and deduplication.
We started using the Universal Object restore to restore Exchange, SharePoint and SQL. It handles log truncation just fine and now handles Oracle DB.
If you get the Enterprise version it comes with VeeamONE monitoring which also has tight integration with Veeam Backup and Replication.
Anyways I know I sound like a fan boy but the product is just plain great.
It is difficult to provide detailed advice w/o knowing the environment for which the backup software is needed. I come from a background where the backup software has to be capable of backing up:
- Physical as well as virtual servers.
- MS Windows and Linux, UNIX (HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc.) servers
- CIFS file shares on NAS devices
- Oracle and SQL Server databases on various operating systems and servers.
So to the best of my knowledge, here are some brief general thoughts as I do not have experience with VEEAM, AppAssure, or with Shadowprotect.
I may be doing these software an injustice as I am not really familiar with them so please talk with the vendor as well. (I work in a Symantec NetBackup shop so I cannot legitimately compare the backup products in question).
1. Shadowprotect appears to be a Windows only backup solution w/o VM capabilities. If you are budget constrained and looking for a Windows only backup solution then Shadowprotect may serve your needs. It does not appear to have any advanced capabilities in terms of backup and restore on the VM side so if you have a lot of Windows VMs, you may want to evaluate it’s capabilities in the VM area. It also does not appear to have any special capabilities to backup NAS devices that present themselves as Windows file shares.
2. If you care about Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, VEEAM and Dell both have a sufficient enterprise presence to be included in it while shadowprotect is a smaller player that is not mentioned in the Gartner MQ.
3. VEEAM specializes in all kinds of backups if your environment is strictly VMs (VMware as well as Hyper-V) and it is well thought of in the area of VM backups. It has recently branched out into carrying out physical machine backups but this is a very recent development and I have no idea how well it would do this.
4. Dell AppAssure is capable of both physical and VM backups. However VEEAM is generally thought of as having “better” VM backup capabilities and features while AppAssure has a better track record of backing up physical servers.
5. For all three backup software, you may want to know their capabilities in the areas of:
a. hot and cold database backups and availability of drivers for Oracle, SQL Server, etc.
b. licensing methods (by server/device count, capacity licensing by Terabytes, or a combination of both as this will determine how much you will pay for purchase as well as for ongoing annual maintenance.
c. Availability of backup drivers for VM environments, integration with VM management consoles.
d. Ability to carry out bare metal restore in a DR situation.
e. Many organizations want reporting capabilities that will allow management to see how much is being backed up, what is being backed up, the speed of backups so as to determine backup windows at night, etc.
f. Being able to carry out some pilot testing of the backup software is always very helpful.
6. Other factors relevant to your environment.
Hope that helps out a bit.
Good evening,
if you want to decide backup products obviously depends on your infrastructure and relative target..
In any case, about client (it could be partially extended to server too) I would suggest to review GPO/scripting utilizing real time client backup with robocopy/hobocopy (VSS free backup tool).
Here is my blog post.
www.alessandromazzanti.com
Awaiting more details from you.
Regards,
It is difficult to provide detailed advice w/o knowing the environment for which the backup software is needed. I come from a background where the backup software has to be capable of backing up:
- Physical as well as virtual servers.
- MS Windows and Linux, UNIX (HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc.) servers
- CIFS file shares on NAS devices
- Oracle and SQL Server databases on various operating systems and servers.
So to the best of my knowledge, here are some brief general thoughts as I do not have experience with VEEAM, AppAssure, or with Shadowprotect.
I may be doing these software an injustice as I am not really familiar with them so please talk with the vendor as well. (I work in a Symantec NetBackup shop so I cannot legitimately compare the backup products in question).
1. Shadowprotect appears to be a Windows only backup solution w/o VM capabilities. If you are budget constrained and looking for a Windows only backup solution then Shadowprotect may serve your needs. It does not appear to have any advanced capabilities in terms of backup and restore on the VM side so if you have a lot of Windows VMs, you may want to evaluate it’s capabilities in the VM area. It also does not appear to have any special capabilities to backup NAS devices that present themselves as Windows file shares.
2. If you care about Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, VEEAM and Dell both have a sufficient enterprise presence to be included in it while shadowprotect is a smaller player that is not mentioned in the Gartner MQ.
3. VEEAM specializes in all kinds of backups if your environment is strictly VMs (VMware as well as Hyper-V) and it is well thought of in the area of VM backups. It has recently branched out into carrying out physical machine backups but this is a very recent development and I have no idea how well it would do this.
4. Dell AppAssure is capable of both physical and VM backups. However VEEAM is generally thought of as having “better” VM backup capabilities and features while AppAssure has a better track record of backing up physical servers.
5. For all three backup software, you may want to know their capabilities in the areas of:
a. hot and cold database backups and availability of drivers for Oracle, SQL Server, etc.
b. licensing methods (by server/device count, capacity licensing by Terabytes, or a combination of both as this will determine how much you will pay for purchase as well as for ongoing annual maintenance.
c. Availability of backup drivers for VM environments, integration with VM environments.
d. Ability to carry out bare metal restore in a DR situation.
e. Many organizations want reporting capabilities that will allow management to see how much is being backed up, what is being backed up, the speed of backups so as to determine backup windows at night, etc.
f. Being able to carry out some pilot testing of the backup software is always very helpful.
6. Other factors relevant to your environment.
First off, pleasure to meet you virtually. I actively work with all three of these products. All of these manufactures are reputable however, they have specific differences when considering backup. Three questions that come up...
1. How much are you backing up?
2. How often are you backing up (nightly, weekly, etc.)?
3. How virtualized is your environment?
Without answering these questions its hard to make a solid recomendation.
Hope this helps!
Ian
480-902-1117
ian.carey@insight.com
Please give a summary of your environment. That will help determine the
backup software.
Assuming this is not a seed question (e.g. its a legitimate request for info/insight ;) vs one to stimulate discussion around the three vendors mentioned, How about some more info and context as to what you are looking for including your needs, environment requirements?
Do you need just protection for virtual or also for physical, if also physical, are those servers or end point/clients?
What hypervisors, vmware, hyper-v, kvm, xen or others?
what operating systems, how many, how much storage, what applications and plugins?
will you be needing to send a copy of, or replicate data off-site or to another location?
how much data changes per day, what type of protection granularity do you need for your different applications RTO, RPO and service requirements?
What do you currently have for backup/data protection, what do you like or dislike, issues, problems, or wishlist?
How much budget do you have, do you need to use existing hardware and or software licenses?
Have your done a proof of concept with the products you mentioned or others, are you planning on doing a POC or simply look at speeds, feeds, specs and price or who has the best giveaways? ;)...
How about some more info and people can provide more insight...
Check out Datto, it does all 3 together
I have not had experience with Dell App Assure but I have had great experience with Veeam and with Shadow Protect.
I have been using Veeam for almost 7 years with our VSphere Farm and now HyperV. The product is very strong in its abilities to do full, incremental, and file level restores. It has saved us several times and I can’t begin to recommend it enough.
As for ShadowProtect, it is another great product that we have used on our most critical physical servers to do bare metal restores when upgrades or patching has unexpectedly gone wrong.
I highly recommend both products.
Well if you have a mixed environment of virtual and physical and want
one product then Veeam would be out of the question.
ShadowProtect can offer socket based pricing on Virtual that is
competitive to Veeam. Also have some new functionality for automating
the testing of backups coming out. If you are talking with anyone at
StorageCraft I would ask them about it. ShadowProtect does require an
agent to be installed. They install a low level driver that helps in
capturing a better backup. It also allows them to be able to restore
that image back to any platform virtual or physical. Virtual boot for
testing and a temporary fail over is a great feature
Dell AppAssure one thing that is concerning is what is it's future
with Dell? With the purchase of EMC will it be sold off to help in
paying for the EMC purchase? Also you are tied to the AppAssure
console. Almost anything that is done with the backup images has to
be done within the console.
We only have done a pilot with Veeam. Like it a lot but have no knowledge of the others.
Sorry, I don't know two of those applications, I only know a little about
veeam. I can only give general guidance.
As always with these things, you have to decide what your requirements are,
and their relative priority and importance. Check those against the
respective products and road maps to see how they align. I know I'm being
Captain Obvious but since you didn't include any of your requirements in
the email, I thought it worth mentioning.
So for example,
How big are your data sets?
Do the products do incremental backups? How are they implemented?
Do you want a UI or a CLI ?
Integration with logging tools?
VMware, Microsoft or both?
See how each program performs against your requirements and then decide.
I'm sorry to report I've only personally used Avamar backups for the past several years and it does work really well for virtualized and non-virtualized systems.
I've heard really good things about Veeam in virtual environments but I don't have any experience with the other two products.
I would recommend a POC – have the vendor provide you the solution to test it out on site. We are currently having a client evaluate a Unitrends solution in this manner. It provides them ample time to test and determine the pros and cons in a real world situation. All products listed have advantages and disadvantages. Without knowing the environment it is tough to advise on the best selection.
Look at veeam instant recovery feature.
Of the 3 solutions you've listed, I would recommend Veeam. I would also highly recommend you look at Hewlett Packard Enterprise StoreOnce solutions.
Desktop Backup software
It is very critical to take backup of your system on an on-going basis.
1. Pybackpack
This has a very simple and intutive user interface. This has the following two tabs:
Backup: Specify the backupset name, and the backup destination. You can also specify a remote server where the backup can be stored via SSH. From the backup tab, you can also launch the backupset editor, where you can specify the backupset name, description, the files and folders that needs to be included or excluded from the backup.
Restore: Select the backup location from where you like to restore, and the backupset name.
# apt-cache search pyback
pybackpack - user friendly file backup tool for GNOME
# sudo apt-get install pybackpack
# pybackpack
Read more: Backup Your Files/Folders on Ubuntu Desktop using Pybackpack GUI Tool
www.thegeekstuff.com
3. Backerupper
Backerupper is a straight forward backup program that takes backup of the directories that you specify. Apart from placing the backup on the system, you can also copy the backup to some other location on your local network.
Do the following to get backerupper started.
# wget voxel.dl.sourceforge.net
# tar xvfz backerupper-0.24-32.tar.gz
# cd backerupper-0.24-32/
# ./install.sh
# backer
And for more info in details and how can you configure step by step Please visit the linuxaws.wordpress.com