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So currently I am looking at a few options to improve my company's back-up solution and I stumbled across a few ideas and quotes regarding the following:

HP x1000 G2 Network Storage System

Dell PowerVault DL2200

Now, these both seem great, and currently I'm leaning towards the Dell one. But I'm running into a few different questions in my head.

  • Are they really as easy to set up as they say?
  • Are they actually just a crock or are they a better solution for the money?
  • Is there any tweaking that needs to be done that is not listed in the manual?

Currently, we just have a daily backup of our server 2003 (soon to be upgraded) Domain controller and our other server '03 machine running our SQL 2005 (also soon to be upgraded) running to tape, with a second backup to a network drive for our SQL server. I would honestly like to move to these because from everything that I have read over the past week or so has been positive and seems reassuring. Our SQL tape drive is also failing I believe because it won't retention in Veritas. These are mission critical backups too so that is another reason why I want to be absolutely sure before I go and spend the money on them.

Any input would be appreciated, also, if anyone has had any personal experience with them, that is of course a plus!

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

The industry is definitely moving towards this type of disk based backup, and while both of these are probably better than your tape library, here are a few things to consider...

The Dell solution is really just comvault software on Dell hardware, not too much secret sauce. Comvault will do deduplication to allow you more retention, but its not dynamically variable bit rate dedup (it dedups on a fixed length bits, but you can change the bit length manually).

The HP uses their own Software, but its not an industry leader in that space. At the end of the day, the software is what will create the ease of use.

A few other similar options you might consider...

EMC's Avamar is probably the bes product in the space, with integrated HW and SW from one company, but you're probably going to pay more for it.

Symantec has recently come out with their own NetBackup appliances called the NetBackup 5000 series. This is still a new product, but it is an integrated product from 1 vendor, and since you currently use the Veritas product (Symantec purchased veritas a while ago) it would be pretty easy for you to make the move.

The sizing form most of these will really come down to how much data you need to backup, and how long you want to hold onto it.

Hope this helps

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Thankss, I will look into these other ideas before going through with anything. Does it help the case that the quote I received from Dell included Symantec software over the Commvault software? Or would I be better off with just the straight object from Symantec? –  TylerShads Jul 19 '11 at 12:25
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