Microsoft System Center vs. Percona XtraBackup

For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.

Incentivized

Well suited to databases < 10TB. For larger than this, I would go with snapshots.

• Allows the grouping of devices by user.
• Allows controlling updates being deployed to user devices.
• Allows for the repurposing of machines by being able to load new or updated software on machines that already are in the system.
• Allows us the ability to wipe a machine clean and restore it back to the configuration that was assigned the machine.

Incentivized

• Non-blocking backup : Backup process will not put any lock on the database.
• Fast recovery : As it's a file level backup so it's quite fast in both backup and recovery.
• Consistent backup : Xtrabackup always ensures consistent backup.
• Easy to configure and Use.
• Integration with clouds

• The product could improve in the area of having better mechanisms in place with how the SCEP client is deployed/installed from the server on the management side. We have run into this firsthand with the client not installing on an endpoint, and then having to take the time to investigate why it was not installing.
• A second improvement that can be made is to keep trying to improve the products detection rate for finding malware/viruses. The case can be made that there are some products out there that do a better job at this and have a higher detection rate.

Incentivized

• The only feature that could use some improvement is partial backup restores. For example, I have a multi-tenant database at the schema level running on a single Percona Server instance. As a tenant grows too large for the share instance or becomes a noisy neighbour we need to move a the tenants schema to its own instance with minimal downtime, meaning that we would run the new instance as a replica with replication filters until failover. In terms of doing a consistent backup, there may be challenges and it is currently possible with XtraBackup, but it would be great if the process was simplified and ensured to be consistent.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.

Incentivized

Takes a bit of getting used to when you first set it up.

Incentivized

There is a fair amount of documentation out there to help you when you have questions or run into issues with this product as well as tutorials on some of the more common tasks. Between the documentation and the overall ease of use we haven't had to deal with direct Microsoft support for this product.

Incentivized

If you pay for support it is great, otherwise you have to google.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.

Incentivized

We have evaluated Mysqldump and MySQL Enterprise backup. Mysqldump is not a scalable solution. MEB is a paid and closed source. As we are truly open-source, we were looking for an open-source solution that was reliable and scalable. Xtrbackup has all the required features to fulfill our requirements.

• It has allowed the enterprise to standardize on a single platform for monitoring.
• Easier troubleshooting of issues with Microsoft platforms.
• Greater visibility of issues across platforms when applications are hosted in a mixed environment.
• Additional costs for monitoring systems that are not directly supported with additional packs (iSeries, Linux on Power).

Incentivized

• Secure, reliable, fast and consistent backups. Open source with zero cost.
• We satisfy our regulatory requirements.