Vera-428803 (9/11/2012)
Hi all,We are about to replace our infrastructure, inclusiding backup and tape library. For backup and recovery, we will use CommVault, an Enterprise backup and recovery software. Apparently, with this tool you can setup backupplans for SQL server too. That way you make server SQL backupplans once and then dedicate servers to the plan.
Until now I worked with maintenance plans with different steps in it and that works fine.
My questions is: which is better to use, maintenance plans or 3rd party software. Does anyone know what the pros and cons are?
Thank you for taking the time to read my question.
Regards,
Vera
I have used both the 3rd party tools like Litespeed, Netapp, Tivoli and also native maintenance plans.
All the 3rd party tools do a good job on compressing the backups well but you need to understand them well to be prepared for recovering from a DR or troubleshooting some bugs. For example Netapp demanded some mouting of LUNs and we had to be very careful when we used snapmanager.
But then 3rd party tools are 3rd party. You may encounter some bug at some point of time.
From 2008 R2 onwards, compression is built within the product which makes the backups smaller, faster but at a cost of come CPU.
I rely on native compressed backups but also have SAN snapshots running so that an entire server can be rebuild within minutes.
Thanks
Chandan