Goodbye Veritas, Hello CommVault

We've been in the process of completely revamping our backup strategy for several months as our backup needs greatly outgrew our capacity last year.  The goal was to create a sweet disk-to-disk-to-tape solution first and then look at better off site replication second.  To meet our objectives we needed to buy lots of disk space and a tape autoloader.  We've given our uber volunteer Tom Templin the new title of "technology purchasing agent" as Tom seems to find us amazing deals on gear. 

Tom got us a special bid direct from IBM on this sweet TS3100 22 tape autoloader which also had a $1500 rebate ... nice!

We're still working on how best to get lots of inexpensive backup disk space without going ghetto ... the Promise VTrak M500p looks umm, promising (ha!) ... ~10TB for $8000+

Another question we had is should we continue to use Veritas Backup Exec as our backup software.  Backup Exec works ok, but setting up more sophisticated D2D2Tape schedules, retention policies, etc is a lengthy complicated process.  So it was time to see what else was out there that might be better.

I tasked our uber volunteer Dustin with finding us the best solution given our needs and budget ... and after downloading and testing about every backup software known to man, we have our winner:  CommVault Galaxy Express

I should note that Dustin has lots of familiarity with CommVault's Enterprise backup software ... you get that from dealing with 200 some servers you are responsible for ;-)

I called CommVault back in December to see what options they had for a smaller shop like GCC.  I was told no charity pricing and they sent me over to a channel partner to actually get a quote.  We described what we were looking to do and soon got a quote for $8000-10,000 ... let's just say my budget is WAY under that.  The other frustrating part is that we could not get an eval copy no matter how many times I tried ... which is just stupid.  So no eval and huge $$ ... but Dustin really liked CommVault which carries a TON of weight in my book. 

So it was looking like we'd end up sticking with Backup Exec due to budget and not finding anything else any better ... bummer.  Then we stumbled upon the Express version of CommVault listed on Dell's website ... somehow we missed seeing the express version earlier since it's only sold through a few select partners like Dell.  Of course we weren't too hopeful about it given it's "express" name ... figuring it must be pretty lame given it's entry price of $999 list.  But an option is an option so I called our Dell Storage Specialist to get some info.  Turns out he didn't know much about it either so he conferenced in a CommVault engineer.  Turns out the express version is identical to the enterprise version ... just has some options locked out.  I explained what we were trying to accomplish and sure enough the express version is a great match and the price is oh so nice.

Would you believe they don't give out evals of the express version either!  GRRR.  I mentioned that was a deal breaker for me and eventually they did find a copy to snail mail me ... again, it shouldn't be this hard to get eval software.  Dustin came to church the past 2 Saturday mornings and got it installed with initial configs ... he said it's identical to the big daddy enterprise version except some features are greyed out.  He gave Ed and I a tutorial on job setups/schedules/etc and I must say it IS soo much easier that Backup Exec. Ladies and gentlemen we have our winner!  The biggest limitation of the express version is a max protection of 15 servers.  We're over that, but we have a number that aren't production level that NTBackup will work just fine to back up. 

So if you're looking for backup software check out CommVault's Galaxy Express ... the features are top tier and the great pricing make it our top pick ... and no, you don't need to have Dell gear to use it or get it.

So long Backup Exec ... hello CommVault!

Comments

[dan]

Jason,

I'm a Pastor in San Diego and I also work in sales for a data storage VAR in San Diego. We sell RAID, NAS, SAN, Tape Backup solutions. You should have Tom give me a call or drop me an email. I will give you the best pricing and service possible.

Dan Slagle
dan@newlifesd.com (church email)
dslagle@storehousetech.com (work email)

[Rob]

Check out Coraid's AoE technology for cheap storage. We have 30+ TB in place w/ little issues to date.

[Chris McGuffin]

Jason,

Does this product backup the exchange server mailboxes? It looks like there might be a separate product for exchange, but brochure wasn't too clear. I turned 50 a couple of weeks ago, so it might be a braincell issue on my part.

[Ian Beyer]

Jason,

Over here at COR, we were faced with having to upgrade Veritas BackupExec from 9.x to 10.5 simply to allow us to back up our shiny new 64-bit server. As seems to be the case with everything Symantec touches, I'd heard horrible things about the new version of the software. To make things worse, no charity pricing was available, putting us in the $8000 range as well. Strikes 1,2, and 3 for Symantec. I ended up settling on CA's BrightStor ArcServe product, which is a lot more user-friendly. CA was more than happy to extend the 30-day trial license as long as we needed to, and they gave us competitive upgrade *and* charity pricing. The end result is that we upgraded/replaced the whole enchilada (including Exchange, SQL Server, and open file agents) and added a few client licenses for under $3000.

[Bryan Johnson]

At our office, we use EMC Retrospect and like it. It's really good at the disk-to-disk part. We've owned the product since before EMC bought it from Dantz.

Just this week I purchased and installed an inexpensive chassis from Addonics. The Disk Array 5SA was $130 and fits 5 SATA drives in 3x5.25" drive bays. I put it in their ST5X1PM-B chassis for another $200. This chassis has an eSATA connector and an internal 5-port multiplier which allows us to connect all 5 devices to an SI 3132 based PCIe host adapter at $35. Performance isn't awesome since all 5 drives share the 3Gb/s channel, but it's acceptable for our backup purposes.

You can buy a similar chassis from them configures with a SAS style multi-lane connector, 5 discrete SATA connectors, or USB connections. The best part is that when all this is done, there's room in the bottom for an optical drive. Add 5 500GB SATA II drives and slap in a SATA DVD burner and you've got a significant platform for backup related stuff.

I really like having two cables running to this device 1 power and 1 eSATA. It makes for a clean install.

[Jason Powell]

Chris - yep, it does right down to the individual email/calendar/task item :-)