AG Credit Expresses Thrill of Solving Its Data Protection ProblemThe following text is from an email that was sent to our Customer Support Department in May of 2002. William, Just thought that I would send you a copy of what I sent to David Coursey (editor of AnchorDesk, at CNET). His story today was regarding backup solutions. I had to send him an email! It was as follows.... David, for quite some time now I have enjoyed reading your column and I am delighted to tell you about what I have come to love as a backup solution. I will try to keep this as brief as possible while still giving you an idea of where I am coming from. Backups as a whole are the bane of network responsibilities. I don't know how many times I left work at the end of the day just hoping that the nightly backups were going to run without incident. This of course was after several hours on the phone with either CA ArcserveIT or Backup Exec's tech support (we ran both with several different types/manufacturer of tape drives just to see if we could get one to work more reliably than the other, all to no avail). Usually tech support would tell me something like I needed to upgrade the BIOS on my tape drive (that's funny, the backup worked yesterday and I haven't changed a thing, but unless I flash the BIOS they won't support me)! Most of my conversation were an exercise in futility and still left me with failing backups. Not until I implemented our current backup solution did I gain any relief. We currently use a product from a company named EVault. With the EVault client running on my servers, the data gets compressed, encrypted, and sent across the wire to their vault. Their Delta processing quickly scans the data for changes and only backs up the changed files. Where this process greatly differs from other "incremental backups" is in the restore process. You are able to restore the entire backup data from last nights backup, rather than having to mount several tapes (monthly, weekly, etc.) to get your system back to a useable state. Currently I have approximately 200GB on their vaults. I back up 20 servers every night across circuits varying from 128K lines to a full T-1, all managed from my desktop PC. I receive daily email notification of backup status, and on the rare occasion that a backup does not complete (either WAN circuit or a process other than EVault's gets hung), I get a telephone call from their tech support, asking if I need any help. $100,000 dollars a year to Computer Associates didn't even get me close to that kind of tech support! |
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