Percona XtraBackup vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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

Starwind VTL is a great solution for customers that want the benefits of a physical tape library without the hefty price tag and the manual intervention required when changing tapes as it is automated. In addition, Starwind VTL virtual tapes are "air-gapped" as they are in LTO format.

• 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

• Allows you to use Veeam and other software that uses Virtual Tape Libraries while getting rid of actual tape drives and tapes
• Backblaze B2 implementation is great - keeps storage costs low while automating backups to the cloud storage
• Low cost and great support by the Starwind technical team
• Feature-rich and in constant development

• 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.

• Set-up is confusing.

Their support is great and the interface is not as user friendly

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

Incentivized

The initial setup took some time, however, with the help of the Starwind technical team, we were able to set it up from start to finish including seamlessly adding it to our existing backup solution. After that, there was no need for any additional setup or troubleshooting.

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

Incentivized

Great and reliable product with little need for support

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.

We've looked at physical tape backups, however, the infrastructure is too costly compared to Starwind VTL and it also requires manual changing of tapes that users will not want to do or forget to do. With VTL, it works exactly like a physical tape library with the same benefits and full automation.

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

• ROI was immediate as we got rid of expensive sneakernet backups with hard drives in a Pelican case
• One-time cost of the product is very cost-effective
• Support contracts are reasonable and we received excellent support throughout
• We have much better peace-of-mind with our data being protected better