Quest Rapid Recovery is a data backup and restore offering from Dell. It provides virtual standby, encryption, replication, deduplication, and the ability for users to run without restore.
$1,819.99
Veritas NetBackup
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Veritas NetBackup is a backup-as-a-service product providing data recovery and protection for enterprises. It supports physical, virtual, and cloud systems and features an automated disaster recovery capabilities.
AppAssure works well for quick access to point in time backups of Windows machines without having to do a complete restore. The virtual standby function is useful as a disaster recovery or high availability solution. Recent upgrades to the product and rebranding to Rapid Recovery look promising. If your Linux machines are mission [critical] make sure your administrators test restores so they can perform them in a timely manner should the need arise.
Like most enterprise backup applications, Symantec NetBackup (NBU) suffers from complexity. Using and understanding advanced features can be challenging at times. Real world experience is needed to know if they are worth the time to implement. On the other hand I have found NBU relativity easy to use with a little training from just a simple backup scheduling and restore perspective.
Continuous backup with deduplication and compression
The P to V function of the software is create. To be able to back up physical machines and create a hot spare on a virtual environment was a great selling point.
Can back up physical and virtual (ESX or Hyper-V).
Support for newer operating systems (Windows, Linux, VMware) is slow to be added. Usually takes 3-6 months from the new version being released for it to be supported.
There is no way to automate the testing of the virtual standby which a lot of comparable products are able to do.
The software has a backup type called "base image" which is essentially taking a full backup after an unexpected shutdown of the server. If your servers crash and they are very large, this may impact your storage requirements significantly. They do now have synthetic full backups which alleviate this issue a bit but they are not perfect either.
Veritas continues to keep up with the backup game. There virtual machine backup capabilities are now top notch, and I believe they will prove valuable when our cloud presence demands a backup solution.
NetBackup provides a complete, flexible data protection solution for a variety of platforms. The platforms include Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and Linux systems. NetBackup lets you back up, archive, and restore files, folders or directories, and volumes or partitions that reside on your computer. During a backup or an archive, the client sends backup data across the network to a NetBackup server. The NetBackup server manages the type of storage that is specified in the backup policy. During a restore, users can browse, then select the files and directories to recover.
In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.
Veritas support is very prompt and the acknowledgement/followup is hugely appreciable. They go deep to the issue and provide you satisfactory solutions. Creating ticket in portal is also very easy, does not adhere to severity priority, even if Sev2 response is very quick.
Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results
I've been using Rapid Recovery for the last 6 years and before that we had used Backup Exec, but it was a different implementation as we were still running backups to LTO3 tapes using the full/incremental backup schemes. So Rapid Recovery (AppAssure at the time) was a big change for us, backing up to disk instead with base images and changes. I would assume Backup Exec can do this as well, but haven't used it since switching. NovaBACKUP was a lower cost solution that seemed geared towards smaller and simpler configurations
CrashPlan has the capability to sync data with a cloud storage source. This is great for a workstation where data is typically only for one user. However, Netbackup does a much better job for maintaining multiple levels of file restores for Enterprise Servers. Netbackup has a superior management console that does not rely on Cloud services in the event of an internet outage.
Veritas NetBackup is very expensive, and I think price is the main reason which some customers don't want to use this solution. The price is fair. Most people have felt this solution was somewhat expensive. licensing model is based on the number of NetBackup clients, agents, servers, and options that NetBackup will be protecting or run on. A customer purchases the same number of licenses as the count of clients, agents, servers, and options.
Education, Consulting and Managed services to keep our business running smooth.They provide the expertise needed to help you bridge the gap between excellent information management solutions and the information essential to help you reach maximum business value. They Meet information management goals with agility and flexibility.
AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file.
One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime.
The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites.
We never experienced a significant system or data loss during the time we used NetBackup. We restored individuals files and small databases based upon user mistakes, but we never had to implement a DR plan. From that aspect, it is difficult to evaluate the ROI. Backups are a commodity service. Features are very similar across multiple tools. Once you decide to stay on-prem or move to the cloud, the list of options are narrowed. Then it becomes a matter of price.
From an administration and support perspective, the ROI is low. Vendor technical support is not always responsive. The first two tiers of support are not knowledgeable and their typical recommendation is to read the white paper. My small team spent a lot of time troubleshooting NetBackup, often without much vendor help.
