Hi peers,
Can you share with the community 2-3 top pain points you've been experiencing during the Backup & Recovery solution purchase?
How have you been able to overcome them, if at all?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the PeerSpot community.
@Martin Mash sums things up quite nicely.
It all comes down to what you are trying to achieve for your SLA and RTO/RPO when determining the best solution for your company.
The vendor is all subjective as they offer different options within their applications, and most do similar things. Many times it comes down to personal preference versus what should be the chosen solution.
I think @Martin Mash gave the overall concerns and another good question was how much the business is willing to pay for the protection they want?
What we found was using a dual protection solution. One solution was Veeam for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and hardware on-premise and Zerto for Cloud and non-Microsoft servers and VMs (VMware & Linux) with a copy of anything in the cloud also being replicated back on-premise to the DR site in an entirely non-discoverable VLAN/Subnet with all the other backups on NAS.
This broke up Mission Critical from Business Necessary and allowed us to create faster RPO/RTO times which are okay when failing over but HORRIBLE when you have to fail everything back.
Since all development was located in the DR site with the understanding that if a failover was needed, it was failing over on development hardware until the main site was back up. This kept the cost within reason and allowed periodic testing of the failover while updating development data.
1. To get the businesses requirements RPO/RTO, offsite DR location
2. To get the technical requirements, what databases to protect (some applications comes bundled with databases).
3. How much the businesses can pay for the protection?
1. Determine if your needs are on-prem, cloud, hybrid, etc. as not all solutions work in all circumstances. And make sure the solution works for volumes, files, Exchange if needed, SQL if needed, and if it will deal with logs.
2. Make sure the solution cleans up after itself. I've run into one solution that when you back up file sets to a NAS, even though the software is supposed to only keep a certain number of days stored, it doesn't always. So I had to manually clean up older backups from the NAS to make sure room was always available. This can also be if using a Windows backup to a local external hard drive where it just fills the drive as it doesn't clean up old data.
3. Make sure what you backup is retrievable and can either be written to an alternate location, overwrite the original files, or downloaded and moved to the original location after a rename of the file that may still exist. This would allow you to have multiple copies of the same document, if necessary.
4. Make sure a restore happens in a reasonable time frame and check the cost of the restore. Many cloud backups, depending on where the data is stored, could be very inexpensive, but might take hours to restore if in cold storage. The more readily available the data, the higher the cost to restore.
5. Verify that your backups are actually working and test regularly to make sure data is recoverable. There is nothing worse than thinking things are backing up but later to find out that the solution hasn't worked for a period of time and there is no recent recoverable data.
6. Make sure you have all the correct type of connections required for the solution. IE: enough bandwidth if cloud based, proper network connections if on-prem based. I ran into this issue where I thought I could just run the backup solution on a 1 GB connection but the solution required a 10 GB fiber connection. Some new GBICs and I was set, but until I had those connections the solution wouldn't connect.
Hardware and software can be re-installed, but if the data isn't available, that can be catastrophic to a business. Try and get a Proof of Concept to make sure whatever solution fits your needs will actually work in your setup.
Very good description and details shared by @Martin Mash.
We had the same challenge with one of our clients. We have gone through the complete PoC of cloud / local backup and cloud DR (using Acronis). We've found DR on local infra needs lots of effort and suitable technology to support.
Before you get any product /solution, a PoC and a failover test are a must.
Hi @Ali Yazıcı, @reviewer1294890, @Daniel Aramayo, @Kevin Honde, @reviewer896385 amd @Anteneh Asnake,
Would you mind sharing some of your professional experience with the community?
Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge!