Bakbone NetVault?
August 6th, 2008 @ 11:51 am
I had a conversation yesterday with Bakbone about their NetVault product. As we’ve moved heavily into virtualization (90% of our infrastructure is virtualized at this point), backup and DR has become a growing challenge. Ideally, we need to be able to back up entire virtual machines directly from the SAN, with the ability to restore and entire VM, or individual files within a VM. In addition, properly protecting Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange are high priorities. The ability to do message level restore in Exchange is also somewhat important.
Our aging Backup Exec installation seems to become more and more cumbersome and problematic, and seems to have the common problem of one product trying to do way too much and not doing any one thing exceptionally well. I think it’s time to move into a more enterprise-class product - something more closely tuned to our needs. NetVault initially seems like a potentially good fit. If anyone has any experiences with NetVault or has any other recommendations, I’d love to hear from you.
Halfway through a migration from an ageing backup product (backing up over 200 servers) onto NetVault.
Where to begin. The technical support we experienced after finding a few problems was very defensive initially blaming us for what turned out to be basic functionallity (problems using shared virtual tape libraries on ’smart clients’)
The GUI is not pretty. This sounds trivial, but you’ll soon find that it’s not easy to get an overview of whats happening
We’ve experienced numerous issues with interactions between NetVault and the tape library/robotics.
The software cannot handle more than 30 or so jobs pending in the queue. We had a library problem that meant jobs had no media to write too. The jobs were pending in the queue until eventually Netvault became unresponsive and needed a hard reboot.
It’s not all terrible though, the sVTL smart client concept is neat.
NetVault jobs are easier to configure and administor than other products I’ve used.
Just test test test and you should be good to go. Just don’t believe the sales hype you’ll get. If someone tells you it does something, don’t believe them until you see it working in your own environment.
Comment by A Nonymous — August 20, 2008 @ 6:03 am