Category: backup

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Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) 2010


Symantec’s Backup Exec System Recovery has always been a pretty great product. Allowing admins to snapshot systems to give them a quick restore of OS, Apps and settings as well as dissimilar hardware restores, restore to virtual machines and more has made it a very popular tool 🙂 This month of Novemeber sees the release of BESR 2010 with new versions and new features, so let’s take a look.

Different Editions

BESR 2010 comes in the following flavours:

  • Server Edition: RRP = $795
  • Windows Small Business Server Edition: RRP = $495
  • Desktop Edition: RRP = $69
  • Linux Edition (available December 2009): RRP = $495
  • Virtual Edition: RRP = $2495
  • Starter Kit: RRP = $3495

An optional add-on is “BESR Management Solution” which allows you to centrally manage BESR jobs across your network. Perhaps surprisingly, this is available to all BESR customers free of charge!

FAQs:

What is the Starter Kit? The Starter Kit includes 5 Server Licences (with Granular Restore) and 10 Desktop Licences)

What is the Virtual Edition? A single Symantec BESR Virtual Edition licence allows you to protect all Windows VM’s on a single physical server. Companies should realise some definite savings here.

What is the Linux Edition? This gives image level backup of Red Hat & SUSE linux systems through a CMD-line interface.

What does it support?:

Symantec BESR 2010 fully supports:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Windows 7
  • Exchange 2010
  • Hyper-V 2.0
  • vSphere 4.0
  • XenServer 5.5

Full Windows Support:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008, including SP1 and
Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Windows Essential Business Server 2008
• Windows Small Business Server 2003 and 2008
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family including SP1 and R2
• Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 (SP1)
• Windows Vista Ultimate, Business and Enterprise
• Windows XP Professional/Home (SP2 or later)
• Windows XP Media Center
• Windows 7 Ultimate, Enterprise and Professional

Full Virtual environment support:

• VMware vSphere 4.0
• VMware ESXi 3.5 and 4.0
• VMware ESX 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0
• VMware Server 1.0 and 2.0
• VMware Workstation 4, 5, and 6
• Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and later
• Citrix XenServer 4.x and 5.x

Full Linux Environment Support:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, SP1 and SP2 (x86) 32-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, SP1 and SP2 (x86_64 not ia64) 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 (x86) 32-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 (x86_64 not ia64) 64-bit

Note: SUSE Desktop & RedHat Desktop are NOT supported and BESR f Linux is a 32bit app..so it you’ve disables 32bit runtime, it won’t work.

All in all, BESR 2010 is a pretty good bit of kit and will definitely make things easier should there be a disaster with the servers 🙂

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Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 & Seagate


Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) is soon to arrive in it’s 2010 incarnation (first half 2010) so this week’s TechEd Conference is revealing a host of new features.

DPM is currently a Windows focused product which, while not surprising, is quite limiting in many corporate IT environments these days. So with 2010, Microsoft have joined together with Seagate and OEM’d their i365 software to extend protection to heterogeneous environments including:

  • Linux
  • Unix
  • Netware
  • IBM iSeries
  • Oracle
  • VMWare

A great list…but you’ll notice no Mac support 🙂

This will instantly remove one of the main barriers to DPM adoption in enterprises,as many places have at least a few Linux/Unix servers running in their datacenters.

Microsoft will also be offering online backups via Seagate’s EVault service and datacenters. It includes data compression and data de-duplication to reduce bandwidth hit and has:

“a network of SAS 70 Type II certified, Tier 3 and 4 hosting facilities, WAN optimised backup and recovery, disaster recovery experts and processes, and a 12-year track record protecting data for over 22,000 customers across the globe”

according to Seagate.

What I find strange is that this doesn’t utilise any of Microsoft’s online services…in particular Microsoft Azure. With BPOS offering an online hosted archive, it seems strange that this technology can’t be extended to store other, non email, data too.

Is using eVault just a temporary measure until Azure is fully up and running? I don’t know but I would expect that it’s in the long term plan to fold all this inside Azure…maybe some kind of Seagate purchase will happen?!

I’m also keen to find out if the data compression and de-duplication are offered to customers who choose to back up on-site to local tape, NAS, SAN etc. De-Dupe is one of the big features Symantec are touting for the next release of Backup Exec (14 I guess to keep with superstition); if MS are including that too then it will really steal some thunder!

Thanks to The Register for this…

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