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Grasshopper
 
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Can anyone give me the pros & cons of using SQL Server backup vs other backup tools like AppAssure Replay for SQL?
Our network admin is swears by this product for backing up the Exchange server but I am wary of third party backup & recovery tools.
Any help/advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks
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SSC Veteran
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I haven't used that product but most DBAs prefer to use native sql server tools like Management Studio to schedule and restore backups. Then your Systems people can backup your backups. Personally I would consider something like Quest's Litespeed or Red-Gate's Sql Backup.
Our company is considering switching to CommVault's sql backup tool and I'm opposing it but may be overruled. Commvault creates sql backups that cannot be used by native sql products like Management Studio so you are totally dependent upon the Commvault software, which of course means learning another tool.
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SSC Journeyman
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In my work place they are trying to get us to go to NetApp's SnapManager for SQL. I tested an older version, 2.1 and it had several setbacks. The biggest item that killed it for me though was no point-in-time recovery capability. A lot of my databases do not require that, but my mission application databases need that. Another thing was that I could not perform operations such as checkpoint checking of backups while they occurred.
We have the newest version, 5.0, and I am going to be testing that next week to see if it fixes any of those shortfalls.
Joie Andrew
"Since 1982"
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Ten Centuries
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Redgate, Idera & Litespeed give compressed, faster backups. You can get trial versions to test them out. I've used Redgate & Idera and have been satisfied with both. (mostly)
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SSCommitted
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SQL server backup = no cost
AppAssure = how much?
Does the network admin realise backing up and recovering exchange server is not the same as for a SQL database?
This tool would have to meet all the criteria you require for a backup and recovery strategy plus offer you something the native backups don't as there is a cost involved.
I would also refer you to this thread
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic691281-361-3.aspx#bm814907
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SSC Eights!
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i've used Veritas/Symantec Netbackup for almost 10 years now. it's buggiest piece of software i've ever seen but i'll use it over native SQL backup any day. The old Computer Associates ArcCenter was probably the worst backup product ever, but i came to my employer after they junked it in favor of Netbackup. this year we upgraded to LTO-4 tapes from DLT and the performance is great. we use the native sql backup/restore only when we have to in special situations and never for production.
i've also used i365/Evault for a year. OK piece of software but you have to be crazy to trust hard disks over tapes to store your backups. but there are much better disk backup products now. the big thing now is dedupe while the backup is running, not post-process dedupe. We had some amazing compression with Evault but LTO-4 tapes are $55 each for 1.6TB of compressed data and i have a lot of my tapes holding almost twice that amount. you can't beat the price since you have to run 2 evaults to sleep at night.
one nice feature is automatic DR. it uses SQL 2005 Express as the backend to store the data and you can replicate it. you backup to one vault and it replicates to a DR vault automatically. If your main vault crashes it will backup to the DR vault. you rebuild the primary, replicate the data over and then backup to the primary again.
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SSCommitted
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SQL Noob (11/9/2009)
i've used Veritas/Symantec Netbackup for almost 10 years now. it's buggiest piece of software i've ever seen but i'll use it over native SQL backup any day.
having said its the buggiest piece of sofware you have ever seen I am intrigued as to why you prefer it to native backups?
the big thing now is dedupe while the backup is running, not post-process dedupe.
dedupe appears to be the latest buzzword in storage circles. What does it mean?
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Mr or Mrs. 500
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| Native + 3rd party compression meets every requirement a DR scenario can present. SQL 2008 also now includes the compression, unsure how well it performs compared to red gate or litespeed.
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SSC Eights!
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first netbackup
it's very flexible and centralizes administration. we only have 30 SQL servers or so but if we had to keep track of backups on each server it would drive us crazy. with netbackup it's easy to track successful and failed backups and even without buying the reporting add on you get decent reporting capability. took me a few seconds to get data for SOX auditors. even the big bugs you can work around by taking the tapes out of the robot
and i will never trust keeping backups on disk. one time i had 2 different hard disks go bad within 3-4 days of each other on a 1TB archive database. i was at Whole Foods when i got the alert, walked back and ordered a new HD from HP. put it in the next day and it took 2 days to rebuild. literally within 3 hours of the RAID rebuilding another hard disk went bad. today i have another server that i have an open case with HP. possibility that the RAID controller is bad. imagine if you had years of backups stored on there.
dedupe is deduplication. say someone creates a spreadsheet, 10 people make changes and save it under 10 different names. Dedupe will figure out the same bits and compress the backup by taking them out. we got some really good compression numbers with evault, but tapes are so cheap and the performance was the same that it didn't make sense. Reason is you have to buy 2 sets of disk backup in case the primary crashes due to OS or hardware issues. if my netbackup install crashes and i have to rebuild from scratch all i have to do is restore the catalog and/or reimport the tapes again and the catalog will be rebuilt. i won't lose actual backups.
it's good practice to remove tapes from the library on a regular basis and send them somewhere else. with disk it's too easy either through a policy change or through foul play to destroy years of backups
didn't like evault since it didn't support differential backups. only full and log backups. and restoring to a different server was a 2 step process. restore a file then run sql code to restore the database from the file. with netbackup it's in 1 step
one time i had to fight with a consultant to move backups to tape. he set it up to back up to local disk and by accident i found that they backups weren't running for 3 weeks because the disk was full and some process to delete old backups didn't work. now we backup to tape, send offsite and can recover data going back months or years if need be. we always get requests to restore data from 3-5 years ago that is missing from the archive database and we have to order tapes. the SOX auditors would kill us if we didn't have this capability. what if you get sued and you get a discovery subpeona to restore data from 3 years ago and you can't because the disk crashed or some other reason? what if there is a criminal investigation that needs data from 5 years ago and you proudly tell the law enforcement people that you deleted it? imagine you were backing up Bernie Madoff's data and you tell people you deleted the old data because you didn't have enough disk or the disk crashed?
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SSC Journeyman
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i had to fight with a consultant to move backups to tape. he set it up to back up to local disk and by accident i found that they backups weren't running for 3 weeks because the disk was full and some process to delete old backups didn't work
Monitoring backups would have revealed this problem quickly enough. Even if you backup to tape you can still have failed jobs if the tape is full and overwrite protection prevents it from being overwritten for a specified amount of time.
I agree with you that a 3rd party solution allows MUCH easier monitoring of backing up multiple systems. My question though is does NetBackup allow the type of backup/restore options that are provided in built-in SQL Server? Point-in-time recovery? Checksums of backups as they are occuring to prevent successful backups of corrupt data? Multiple backup schedules on different databases depending on operational need? I have used NetBackup and Backup Exec for both normal server and Exchange backups before, so I have good ideas of where they are good and bad compared to built-in offerings, but I have never done SQL servers with those products, so I am just curious.
Joie Andrew
"Since 1982"
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