SQL Safe Backup from Houston based software company Idera is a data recovery and protection option.
$1,036
per instance with first year maintenance included
Rubrik
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Rubrik is cloud data management and enterprise backup software provided by Palo Alto-based Rubrik, Inc. It is a software platform that provides backup, instant recovery, archival, search, analytics, compliance, and copy data management in one secure fabric across data centers and clouds.
N/A
HPE Zerto Software
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
HPE Zerto Software aims to enable customers to run an always-on business by simplifying the protection, recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications.
We looked at Cohesity and it could've been a contender had we not already gotten in bed with Rubrik. They seemed to have the same answers to our old problems as Rubrik with a simple platform. While nice, they were not providing anything extra or even close to make us consider …
I think Rubrik, VEEAM and Zerto are great products, really depends on the use case. Zerto is probably the best real time replication technology available for VMs to a single or multiple DR datacenter. They claim they have backup capabilities but they are not in the ballpark of R…
Zerto was far and away from a much better product than RecoverPoint. EMC was unable to perform near as fast and as good as Zerto and required a lot more setup and infrastructure to run.
SQL Safe is appropriate and well-suited for any backup scenario. Having used SQL Safe, I probably wouldn't want to manage a set of servers in the future without it. If you only have a couple of SQL servers, it might not be worth the spend as there are well-maintained free options that are very functional (though they do require more technical knowledge). But I can't think of a scenario where SQL Safe wouldn't be appropriate.
Rubrik is still a relatively new product when compared to other solutions which tackle total data protection. The feature set is quite broad but still needs some refinements. Most of the User Interface is quite straightforward and easy, but some areas are a bit lacking in a description of what the option is used for, or the option is missing. While making the user experience easy, many tunables aren’t present and require a Support Tunnel to be open for a Support person to make a change in the customer’s environment. Seems the first question Support always asks is if you can open a tunnel for them to remote in. Then you’re not able to monitor exactly what they’re doing.
Zerto is well suited for disaster recovery and virtual machine replication between multiple data centers. DR testing for audit or regulations is much easier with Zerto, great reporting, dashboard etc. It is not well suited for physical server replication for disaster recovery or as a primary backup solution.
Anyone with a large disk (VMDK) knows the issues of VMware snapshots. Most backup software is a "point in time backup" that uses snapshots. While the backup can be run multiple times per day the stress of the snapshot on the host and storage is eliminated by the continuous protection of Zerto log replication.
A client had a the disks on a VM go missing for some reason. We had them "flip the switch" for a real fail over and press the fail over button. The VM on our DR site started to come alive as the VM at the customer site was brought down. When the DR VM was fully up, automatic reverse replication started. The DR machine was available in a few minutes (to take into account different host hardware) for access. One the vm at both sites were in sync, we had the customer again repeat the fail over process and the DR site VM was turned off and the Production site VM was brought back on line. This was a 200 GB VM and the whole process was finished in about 3 hours.
Zerto also allows for "Test" fail overs that can be configured on many different functions, such as host, datastore, network and IP usage. Configuring the IPs is crucial to avoid inadvertent site cross contamination of the same VM.
Zerto can also retrieve files from any VM disk on the DR site without starting a VM. Very handy for retrieving files or directories.
Since Zerto is running continuous log replication, changes on the production VM are nearly instantaneously copied to the DR site. As with any data process, having sufficient bandwidth for "churn" peaks minimizes the delay in updating the DR site.
When you're adding a new SQL server, sometimes the install from the management server to the SQL server will fail. I'm guessing this happens because of some version difference in Windows components or similar. Not a huge deal because you can just copy the agent to the SQL server and install it there, but considering how easy everything else is, I would expect this to be a little more fluid.
I ran into a situation where part of our business decided to move their servers to a third-party data center. When they took away a SQL server that I was managing with SQL Safe, anything having to do with that policy took forever. Click. Wait 10 minutes. Window reacts. I'm guessing this is because the Management Console is trying super hard to contact the server in question, but I wish it handled losing a server better than it does.
Automated test restores. I would love to setup automated and random test restores on a regular basis where Rubrik's system will restore a random file or directory to a test SharePoint folder, send a full report, and provide a path to the folder for review and confirmation.
The support has been incredible. Any time we have had a question, it has always been answered within 24hrs. Also, the team is always will to hop on a Zoom call to help walk us through the dashboard and troubleshoot any issues we are having. Also, having the peace of mind that our data is protected should anything happen in our system.
We really like the easy setup of this replication solution, as well as the ease of management. Not to mention, our internal IT Economist determined that the Zerto solution would provide the best ROI out of the competing solutions we analyzed. So far, his calculations have been spot on, and we have saved substantially
The support is top notch both tech and sales team, the tools are simple to use and yet still is feature rich. Security is top of the list, the product is sold and reliable, easy to configure and intuitive to use.
Zerto is very easy to implement and support. Uses are broad, only issues are once something doesn't sync it is difficult to get assistance until your reach tier 2 or tier 3 support. Basic file and folder recovery is great. Live and test fail overs are also easy to implement without issue.
Rubrik's brik is designed with redundancy in mind, ensuring that if one node experiences issues, others can continue to provide backup and recovery services.
Rubrik support has been pretty good. There have been a few issues with new releases we have experienced and are still considering if we want to make the jump to version nine. There are a few things we are concerned about which are giving us pause. That being said, support is working hard to answer our questions.
Overall support is very good. We sometimes get pushback when asking Level 1 support to escalate to Level 2. This causes undue frustrations when you need a more knowledgeable support person to get involved. We've had to escalate to account reps a few times for this scenario. Zerto is very responsive and normally handles our requests very quickly.
Easy to follow and very thorough. Trainer was knowledgeable and helpful answering any questions and providing detailed answers where possible. It's also nice to gain another badge :) There is also the Rubrik University online tutorials to refer back to and keep updated with new innovations. I would say the exam was very hard.
From experience the implementation was smooth and easy, like a simple plug and play format but would need coordination from your network team to be able to see the entire IT infrastructure.
Having all our backups under one umbrella made product management easier, with not need to manage myltip contracts.
The additional analysis of the data after the fact gave insights into our user data, without the need for an addition product, or the impact on live data sets.
We started out using Backup Exec which was in service until we virtualized our environment where it didn't perform as well at the time. Then we switched to Veeam which worked well, but then as we started needing to do migrations and off-site DR, we found ourselves relying on Zerto more often.
We are fine with the 1 year or 3 year support options that Rubrik has had. The support for the on-prem hardware has been great too. We've had them for quite a while (4+ years) and no end of support yet.
For my organization, the pricing model was an upfront investment for the Zerto licenses. My organization prefers to pay upfront and not deal with month-to-month or year-to-year pricing models that most companies are moving to. But for some, the investment may be more than they can afford, and would prefer the year-to-year pricing model.
I mean, it was 6 years ago, but we were up and going with all applications synchronizing in short order. The longest tasks was getting the 30 TB of application data synchronized between the datacenters.
SQL Safe allows me to spend less time managing my DR plan and still maintain confidence that my backups and restores are solid. Saving my time means saving money.
SQL Safe does an amazing job at backup compression over and above SQL's native compression. SQL backups are probably our single largest consumer of network drive space. Any product that helps reduce my network footprint, saves money.
Zerto is like having the best possible insurance ... it just works, and often provides the backups taken overnight that are key in recovering data/work between overnight backups.
Zerto easily enabled the move of primary datacenters by allowing easy failover to a secondary site, and failback to the primary site.
