Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

[dellock6]

I too do not like tape, but if for any reason you need long term retention, it's price per GB is unbeatable, for the simple fact it does not need power to keep data on it, and it's more simple and smaller than a bunch of usb drives to do the same stuff.
Also, about tape reliability, it really depends on the software we use with it: I've never seen for example a Ibm TSM customer having problems in restoring data from tape, while other software are more doubtful. So, I think Veeam "can" develop a stable tape support if they put the right effort in it. Will see.

Luca.

[Gostev]

@Nev thanks for the report, helped me spot minor UI bug there. Looks like source-side deduplication is not accounted for the overall dedupe ratio. There was no target-side dedupe in this case (1.0x), but source-side dedupe reduced data transfer almost 2x - yet, this is not reflected anywhere (except that compression and read numbers do not match transferred).

[J1mbo]

I too do not like tape, but if for any reason you need long term retention, it's price per GB is unbeatable, for the simple fact it does not need power to keep data on it, and it's more simple and smaller than a bunch of usb drives to do the same stuff.

Is it though? Cost/GB looks pretty much identical between LTO-5 and main-brand SATA drives (about 30p in the UK), and you don't need a library nor the often outrageous hardware maintenance with it (nor tape software of course).

When we went from tape to USB drives, BackupExec would often start new tapes for each file (I guess, since the files were larger than the capacity remaining on the current tape) so the USB drives ended up cheaper, faster, and smaller - notwithstanding that there is still some price shock in the SATA space because of the flooding last year. If the backup set will fit on a USB drive, it's a no-brainer for me.

But even if Veeam did have a good solution the chances are no-one would use it for say another year (early adoption, time to migrate etc) by which time tape will be even further into its decline. Just seems like a waste of effort.

[Gostev]

Depends on how LTO 6, 7 and 8 will be coming along - and what cost per TB they will provide.
LTO-6 specs will be available next month already.

[kewnev]

Is it though? Cost/GB looks pretty much identical between LTO-5 and main-brand SATA drives (about 30p in the UK)

Also have to keep in mind that at LTO-5 tape is an enterprise-grade item, whereas a SATA drive of a similar cost would be consumer/desktop grade item. Maybe need to compare with a SAS drive..!

[kewnev]

@Nev thanks for the report, helped me spot minor UI bug there.

My first bug report without even having to try ... happy to help Anton

[J1mbo]

Also have to keep in mind that at LTO-5 tape is an enterprise-grade item, whereas a SATA drive of a similar cost would be consumer/desktop grade item. Maybe need to compare with a SAS drive..!

Maybe, but our archive USB drives get written once then sit on a shelf, so they don't really need to be enterprise since they're not even on!

I was thinking, another advantage to hard-drives is the recovery time - for example recently a user needed to sift through numerous backups due to certain parts of a spreadsheet having been wiped out by someone that had since left. With the disk backup, we could just mount the drives, import the backups, retrieve the file and check for what was missing, rinse and repeat until required data was found. Since this was in a 1.5TB Veeam backup file, doing this from tape would have added several hours to each iteration and needed 1.5TB of slack space somewhere.

[Gostev]

James, this is exactly why most people using tape typically keep 14/30/90 days of latest backups on disk - specifically for the purpose of operational restores. Tapes are usually only used for long-term archival (for example, weekly/monthly/yearly backups that need to be stored for 3/5/7 years). Hard to beat tape for such archival purposes, and recoveries from tape are extremely rare with this usage scenario anyway.

[smile_dav]

Thank you everyone for the precious replies, in general I think it's safe to say that Veeam beats Symantec on many fronts.
There are a few knockbacks for Veeam that I'm sure they will be addressing (say fo example the D2T part.)

We have been selling and distributing Veeam for over 3 years now, and things have changed massively since the start. There are however still alot of people who are yet to realise the potential and opportunity of using Veeam in their environment. I created this post because of such. These replies would do wonders to people considering Veeam because it's a great product and it's easy to use. Pitty there can't be comparisons for legal reasons, because I'm sure Veeam would win that hands down.

@ Gostev, regarding Veeam supporting the backup to tape part, am I right in assuming it would be D2D then the D2T part happens after the retention period is full?

@ J1mbo, Personally, I think more people should abandon tape and use more products like ExaGrid with Veeam!!! Thats just one of the reasons why!

[J1mbo]

Nothing to stop bloggers putting up comparison tables though...

[Gostev]

When D2T happens will be configurable, since many customers have requirement of daily/weekly tape backups as well. For example, every time the backup is taken to disk, the backup file should be also copied to tape and taken offsite.

[kewnev]

There's no doubt that disk restore is much quicker than tape. But I don't think anyone is saying that tape is a replacement for disk. I would say that most who want tape would want it as a way of supplementing disk backup - and that's certainly the case for me. Each media has their place.
Sure I would love to have WAN replication as the offsite backup, but the 25GB WAN traffic each night would not be viable for us. At our main site the best we can get is a 2Mbit link, the data is expensive too. We're waiting eagerly for the National Broadband Network to be implemented (Australia) but thats years off .. At least until then tape support is high on the wish list for us.