Software

Developing a Real Backup Plan with Symantec's Backup Exec 15

Consider this easy-to-use backup solution for any type of infrastructure design.

Logan Harbaugh is a longtime technology journalist.

Backup Exec 15 is the latest version of Symantec’s versatile backup and recovery software.

Although new this year, the development cycle for the software goes back to the early 1990s. As a result, Backup Exec 15 has a maturity, ease of use and feature set that few other products can equal.

With an administrator’s guide that runs more than 1,300 pages, this is not a product for the novice or the faint of heart. Backup Exec 15 is fully capable of supporting backups and disaster recovery for the largest multinational organization.

For all its complexity, Backup Exec 15 is fairly easy to install. Not only is the installation process well automated, but also the ancillary parts needed can be installed automatically.

Large organizations may already have SQL Server and some of the other components in place, as will disk-based backup targets or tape libraries. In that case, the settings needed to configure the necessary accounts and permissions are well documented.

Designed to support various types of infrastructure design, Backup Exec 15 includes agents for the most common server applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, Oracle, Windows and Linux clients, server OSs, and the Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors. Backups can be restored to bare metal (new hardware) or to virtual machines, whether the original system was a physical or virtual system.

For larger organizations, Symantec’s Backup Exec 15 offers the full set of features necessary to ensure that everything throughout the network is protected by a single system that can be managed from one console.

It offers the flexibility to delegate roles to dozens or hundreds of local administrators, while keeping centralized reporting and notifications available to the leaders of the IT department.

Overall, Backup Exec 15 seems to be the powerful and easy-to-use product it claims to be.

Redefining Deduplication

Deduplication is a term that’s often seen in relation to storage these days. In general, it refers to eliminating duplicate items in a storage system, but that can be carried well beyond removing additional copies of the same file. With the ability to deduplicate across multiple backups and multiple stores, Backup Exec 15 can achieve higher degrees of effective compression while retaining all the information.

Some products work at the file level: If a file is changed, the new version is copied to the backup system. Backup Exec works at the block level, which means that only the small blocks of data within a file that have changed are added to the backup system, not the whole file.

Some data is more efficiently deduplicated than others. For instance, the VMDK files for multiple virtual machines are almost all identical, so that 100 50-gigabyte VMDK files, all containing Windows Server, might use only a couple of gigabytes more than the first VMDK. On the other hand, databases or video files often benefit very little from deduplication. But the block-level deduplication in Backup Exec 15 will get the maximum benefit from nearly any type of file. Because it breaks files into small pieces, only that small piece needs to match, not the entire file.

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