Backup Exec 3600

[Disclaimer:  I work for Unitrends and I’m more of a fan of Unitrends than I am Symantec.  At the same time, if I have any facts wrong – I sure would like to know about it.]

Okay – I’ll admit it – I’m really, really excited.  I’m a huge fan of data protection, and the ground just shifted.  Symantec, the 800 pound gorilla in software data protection, just admitted that for years that they’ve had it wrong.  Last week Symantec released its first real backup appliance, the Backup Exec 3600.  (Note: By “real” I mean that the previous deduplication device that they released for NetBackup, the NetBackup 5000 Appliance, wasn’t a real “backup appliance” but rather was a deduplication device like Exagrid or Data Domain.  Symantec released a real backup for NetBackup last week as well, called the NetBackup 5520.)

First, let me say, welcome!  It’s great that Symantec has finally seen the light and is offering an integrated backup appliance rather than just pushing this on some Dell DL2100 or DL2200 hardware, adding some shellscript programming, and calling it a “backup appliance.”  (I absolutely loved the press release quote that this was the only solution available with Backup Exec on optimized hardware and software – Symantec is finally admitting that what they and CommVault have been telling people for years about the Dell relationship is – well – let’s just call it a rather large exaggeration.)  The fact that Symantec is shipping it means that one of the most important things you can have – which we call OTTC (One Throat To Choke) – exists.  Now – the joke we tell about Symantec support is that most of the folks answering backup support calls think “backup” is the person who replaces their favorite soccer or cricket player when they are injured – but even if the quality of the support is terrible, at least you don’t have all the finger pointing that goes on with the software only vendors.

What Symantec has done with the Backup Exec 3600 is package together hardware, Windows, and Backup Exec 2010 onto a 1U platform with two mirrored 40GB operating system drives and 4 2TB backup storage drives arranged in a RAID-5.  This means that they have raw storage of 6TB – which is closer to 5.5TB once you format the drives.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of rather large issues with the way Symantec has approached the backup appliance space.  Here are the most obvious ones:

  • Insanely expensive.  No – I mean incredibly, out of this world, expensive.  Not surprising given how expensive Backup Exec has always been when you added up all of the “backup tax” and associated fees – but even I was surprised at the bottom line.  Talked to a reseller today who told me the base version would cost $25K.  To give you a feel, Unitrends sells a byte-level, content-aware, deduplicating backup appliance with 6TB raw storage for less than $15K MSRP (that’s the Recovery-713.)  For less than $25K with Unitrends, you get 13TB of raw storage in a Recovery-822.
  • Windows operating system.  If you’re going to pick the operating system most likely to get a virus, this is a good choice.  Otherwise – not so much.
  • Only a single 1Gb Ethernet port (the other one is dedicated to appliance management.)  Got to tell you – with increasing data sizes, we see an awful lot of use of multiple NICs.
  • No eSATA or other type of high speed native D2D2D archival capability.
  • A “kind” of approach on licensing where you pay for an awful lot of “extra” things over and above the base model.  Small example?  Centralized administration – which is kind of important if you need to add a second appliance – is extra.
  • No tape support for archival.  (Note: This is available on the more expensive NetBackup 5520 – it’s clear that Symantec is still screwing customers over by artificially constraining their software and now their appliances to justify higher prices for NetBackup.)
  • No NAS or SAN support for archival.
  • You still have to buy a separate server, storage, operating system, and Symantec software to do bare metal (what Symantec now calls “System Recovery” – which most of us know as BESR or Backup Exec System Recovery) and manage it as a completely separate product.
  • …and so on, and so on, and so on…

Hey – with all of that said – it’s a lot better than having no appliance at all.  Deduplication has made it really tough for end-users to successfully balance processor, memory, and I/O on an on-going basis as data grows and not turn into a backup geek (which is unashamedly what we are at Unitrends.)  So if you’ve got a ton of money, and don’t mind the limitations, Symantec at least will allow some abstraction from the internals of backup.

Or…go with a company that lives and dies on this stuff.  You know who I mean. 🙂

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