Crisis backups
In 2015, most companies will revise their IT budgets due to the changing economic situation in the country. If the company was able to keep the IT budget in rubles, then this means reducing the hardware and software purchased in dollars. Moreover, due to sanctions, some companies cannot purchase equipment even if there is a budget. At the same time, there are dozens of companies that are under sanctions, which may be included in the sanctions list at any time and lose support for purchased equipment and software from the manufacturer.
What to do in this case, postpone IT projects until better times? Is there an alternative to eminent commercial backup solutions on free and open source software? Is it possible to get functionality similar to commercial products on it? This article deals with the pros and cons of organizing backup on free software and compares in detail the resulting functionality with commercial products.
To begin with, let us designate the minimum conditions that the software (hereinafter referred to as software) of the corporate level backup should satisfy:
1. Provide regular backups in automatic mode for dozens and hundreds of servers.
2. Provide backup for the most common server operating systems and applications
3. Have commercial support
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In this article, we look at the Bacula Enterprise Edition based on free software and commercial software - Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec Netbackup and HP Data Protector. Two commercial products from one Symantec company were chosen specifically to see the competition and compare the functionality within the same manufacturer.
Of course, when mentioning software on Linux, many immediately express the popular opinion that there is no user interface and the necessary level of support. And indeed, if you read the articles previously written in Habré, you may get the impression of the need for the administrator to work on the command line and memorizing part of the scripts by heart. In fact, Bacula has a decent graphical shell, there are even two of them - the BAT application (Backup Administration Tool installed on Windows / Linux) in Figure 1
Figure 1: BAT Interface
And the web interface Bweb. Therefore, the administrator will be able to perform most of the operations from graphics and only for specific settings he may need a command line.
Figure 2: Bweb Interface
The following error statement concerns support. There is an opinion actively promoted by sellers of commercial software that if their product fails, the manufacturer will solve the problem as soon as possible, which are spelled out somewhere in the contract, and for free software no one will deal with the problem. In real life, everything is a little different. If the software malfunctions and the subsequent careful reading of the support contract, it turns out that the time specified in the contract for 4, 6 hours or the next working day is not the time of writing the correction, but the response time of the manufacturer, i.e. after this time, you will begin to deal with or at least listen to your problem. As a rule, software vendors do not seek to place a time limit on their contracts for correcting the code, and in rare cases, mainly for developed countries and / or large customers, they may undertake to write a correction within 90 days. Bacula also has commercial support, but at the expense of open source there are also additional opportunities to find the error directly to the administrator or to get support from the developer community.
The table below compares the functionality of Bacula, HP DataProtector, Symantec Backup Exec and Netbackup.
As can be seen from the comparative table, backup software from different manufacturers has similar functionality and Bacula Enterprise is absolutely not inferior to commercial counterparts. The obvious outsider here is only Symantec Backup Exec, but this is due to the marketing policy of the manufacturer, which specifically limits some of the functionality to minimize competition with the more “heavy” Symantec Netbackup.
The cost of licenses for creating centralized backup in a mid-level company (copying for 100 virtual or physical servers, 100TB of data, using 10 Oracle databases, Exchange) for commercial software will be at least $ 120,000. When implementing the same backup using Bacula Enterprise, initial investment, since the costs are needed only for support. The cost of support depends on the functionality used and is estimated at 1 year at 10% of the cost of commercial software. Therefore, if in the IT budget of the company, backup costs in the amount of $ 200,000 were planned, then with the help of Bacula it will be possible to implement the project for $ 20,000 and spend the remaining $ 180,000 for something more useful. For example, premium administrators.
What to do in this case, postpone IT projects until better times? Is there an alternative to eminent commercial backup solutions on free and open source software? Is it possible to get functionality similar to commercial products on it? This article deals with the pros and cons of organizing backup on free software and compares in detail the resulting functionality with commercial products.
To begin with, let us designate the minimum conditions that the software (hereinafter referred to as software) of the corporate level backup should satisfy:
1. Provide regular backups in automatic mode for dozens and hundreds of servers.
2. Provide backup for the most common server operating systems and applications
3. Have commercial support
')
In this article, we look at the Bacula Enterprise Edition based on free software and commercial software - Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec Netbackup and HP Data Protector. Two commercial products from one Symantec company were chosen specifically to see the competition and compare the functionality within the same manufacturer.
Of course, when mentioning software on Linux, many immediately express the popular opinion that there is no user interface and the necessary level of support. And indeed, if you read the articles previously written in Habré, you may get the impression of the need for the administrator to work on the command line and memorizing part of the scripts by heart. In fact, Bacula has a decent graphical shell, there are even two of them - the BAT application (Backup Administration Tool installed on Windows / Linux) in Figure 1
Figure 1: BAT Interface
And the web interface Bweb. Therefore, the administrator will be able to perform most of the operations from graphics and only for specific settings he may need a command line.
Figure 2: Bweb Interface
The following error statement concerns support. There is an opinion actively promoted by sellers of commercial software that if their product fails, the manufacturer will solve the problem as soon as possible, which are spelled out somewhere in the contract, and for free software no one will deal with the problem. In real life, everything is a little different. If the software malfunctions and the subsequent careful reading of the support contract, it turns out that the time specified in the contract for 4, 6 hours or the next working day is not the time of writing the correction, but the response time of the manufacturer, i.e. after this time, you will begin to deal with or at least listen to your problem. As a rule, software vendors do not seek to place a time limit on their contracts for correcting the code, and in rare cases, mainly for developed countries and / or large customers, they may undertake to write a correction within 90 days. Bacula also has commercial support, but at the expense of open source there are also additional opportunities to find the error directly to the administrator or to get support from the developer community.
The table below compares the functionality of Bacula, HP DataProtector, Symantec Backup Exec and Netbackup.
As can be seen from the comparative table, backup software from different manufacturers has similar functionality and Bacula Enterprise is absolutely not inferior to commercial counterparts. The obvious outsider here is only Symantec Backup Exec, but this is due to the marketing policy of the manufacturer, which specifically limits some of the functionality to minimize competition with the more “heavy” Symantec Netbackup.
The cost of licenses for creating centralized backup in a mid-level company (copying for 100 virtual or physical servers, 100TB of data, using 10 Oracle databases, Exchange) for commercial software will be at least $ 120,000. When implementing the same backup using Bacula Enterprise, initial investment, since the costs are needed only for support. The cost of support depends on the functionality used and is estimated at 1 year at 10% of the cost of commercial software. Therefore, if in the IT budget of the company, backup costs in the amount of $ 200,000 were planned, then with the help of Bacula it will be possible to implement the project for $ 20,000 and spend the remaining $ 180,000 for something more useful. For example, premium administrators.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/251571/
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