I have started testing out Data Protection Manager 2007 R2 in my learning enviroment. I had previously tested it last year but found it to be horribly slow and inconsistant.
This time I have good hardware to work with and I am getting really sick of Backup exec and the failures (tape control etc)
The server consists of
- Quad Core 2.5
- 4GB RAM
- 1x80GB System Drive
- 4x1TB Sata2 on a hardware RAID controller (RAID0)
- 1x1GB NIC (2 soon)
Money is an issue so the server needs to be cheap, It will server no other use except backups, My plan was to use the 4TB array for short term disk/staged backups then Tape for long term backups. There are some risks in working this method as RAID0 has no redundancy and a loss of a disk will cause a loss of the array (ouch) so I plan to use my slow NAS (raid5) for daily mirrored backups. Something likethis
Exchange—>4TB raid0 (daily+incremental+recovery etc)—>1tb Raid5(daily)—>tape (weekly)
I will connect my 2tb nas via gigabit crossover to remove the overhead from my network and increase speed. I expect to get around 10-20MB/s compared with 300MB/s on the local raid0. This should give me some redundancy and if all goes well I will migrate to local RAID5/6 and remove the NAS all together.
The install and config was very easy, Much faster and better than before. In general the UI is smooth and clean (too clean, See later). Microsoft seems to have taken all the choices out of backing up. Really you just choose the server and the service and you are done. Its simple and works as advertised.
My problems are:
- Errors are hard to diagnose and there seems to be no logging of agents (see prev post).
- Detailed info, Current activitys are hardly detailed. I prefer the advanced info from Backup Exec
- No support for Windows 2000 ( I know its old )
But compared to the now Symantec Bcakup Exec, its better. Not crazy better.. but better. I will stick to the testing over the next few weeks and see how it pans out.
J