BUDRs Revisited

After working with the Datto and Zenith backup and disaster recovery (BUDR) appliances for a while it's time for an update. I've covered 5 categories: Reliability, Service, Integration, Pricing/value, Ease of Use. I've scored each device in each category and summed the scores out of a total of 50 points, 10 for each category.

Here's how it played out:


------------------------------ Zenith ------------------------------
Reliability - the boxes themselves seem to work fine, but periodically I get errors in the backups that require me to restart either the Zenith or the target box. I'm not sure if it's Zenith's software or Shadowprotect. It doesn't happen all that often and the monitoring and ticketing system notifies me well when it does.


Service - For being a e-mail/instant messaging only service, Zenith does a good job. I still wish I had a person to talk to on the phone though.

Integration - I use Autotask and Level Platforms and the Zenith just doesn't integrate all that well with them... I assume since they do their own monitoring. I understand that now I can have the Zenith system push tickets in to my Autotask but I haven't done it yet. I'm not sure I can do any monitoring of the Zenith box with my Level Platforms. I'd like to in order to keep everything managed by my NOC. That's a task for another day.


Pricing/value - While the Zenith has a considerably higher up front cost I'm not getting as much hardware for the buck. Zenith beefed up their servers in the last iteration but Datto still beats them in most all the models. You just need more RAM for virtualization... especially for things like SBS 2008.


Ease of use - the Zenith has a more robust interface, but it's clunky and has too many options buried in submenus. The remote access on the other hand is better for the Zenith since it uses Logmein IT Reach.


------------------------------ Datto ------------------------------
Reliability - The machine itself is at least as reliable as the Zenith. No problems with the hardware. The box is smaller and looks more like an appliance, so I thought maybe it would have cheaper hardware, but apparently not. They've been solid.


Service - The phone support has been spectacular. This is why I'm not looking back at Zenith. I call, get a person on the first try, and they speak English as a first language. Don't get me wrong, some of the support guys overseas are great, but you never know how much of an accent they'll have and sometimes that's a bar to communicating technically. As another item, it's a really nice but small thing to have them send out the offsite hard drive. They even notify you that you need to do it and it's easy to request. They manage the whole process better.


Integration - I don't think the Datto is much better than the Zenith, frankly. In addition, it's a Linux box rather than Windows, so I imagine it'll integrate less well with monitoring services. On the other hand, I've had less problems with the backups on the Dattos, so maybe it's not a big deal. I need to look further in to having the Dattos monitored and fully managed by my NOC.


Pricing/value - When I considered the two products pricing I took in to account several variables: initial cost, monthly cost for support, monthly cost for offsite storage. Because the Datto charges in 1 TB increments for offsite storage I compared the Zenith with similar amounts of storage offsite (the Zenith charges a base plus per GB over last I checked). It comes down to this... the Zenith has a much higher up front cost than the Datto. The Datto has a somewhat higher monthly cost. When I projected the cost of both out 3 years using 2 TB & 3 TB the Datto was hands down cheaper by over 20% for the term. Having more monthly charges for Storagecraft might change this slightly, but not enough to sway me... especially with the service and support bonus for Datto.


Ease of use - Ordering off their website is easy although I've had a couple problems with their website now and then. Maybe they were just doing upgrades to their web hosting hardware? It's easy to buy the Shadowprotect licenses and assign them to clients. Their phone tech support is stellar... have I mentioned that yet? The only problem I have is with the remote management capability of the box. There's a silly drop down box on the support website where you have to choose what you want to do and click submit. You then wait a while for an e-mail link that gives you the remote capability you requested (VNC, web access, etc.). It seems like this could use some work. It's just not nearly as nice as the LogmeIn IT Reach service.


------------------------------ Scoring ------------------------------
Scoring Zenith & Datto out of 10 in each category:

Category	Zenith	Datto
Reliability	8	9
Service	6	10
Integration	7	7
Pricing/value	6	8
Ease of use	7	6
Overall	34/50	40/50

------------------------------ Conclusion ------------------------------
While I don't have any real problems with the Zenith product and they're both pretty slick offerings, I'm going with the Datto for two reasons - price and service. If you are on the Zenith monitoring platform that's probably enough to push you to the Zenith, but otherwise I recommend the Datto.

More Disaster Recovery Thoughts

After much additional thought, we've decided to try the Datto Viridian backup solution. We'll be giving it a try out at a client we just installed a new server at. Datto offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so we're going to install and play with it and if we don't like it we'll just send it back and go back to Zenith's BDR.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the Datto but know the Zenith BDR, here are some comparison points:



There's an article about Datto and Zenith at ByteandSwitch.com if you're interested. After reviewing the above, the questions I have are:

1. Is the service at Datto comparable or better than Zenith? How about responsiveness upon ordering?
2. Is there any reason why I should prefer a Windows BDR OS over OpenSolaris?
3. How is the set up process for the Datto? I like that they provide and do the shipping for the initial offsite image. Much better than the draconian requirements Zenith has.
4. How is the performance on the Datto for virtualization compared with Zenith?
5. What's the ongoing support experience like with Datto. Do they just fix stuff that needs fixing or do they continuously involve the service provider in thinks that should just work?
   

Anyway, I like what I see at Datto. Zenith may have been the thought leader here, but Datto may have built a better widget.

Let me know if you have experience with the Datto or if you would like to recommend a feature of the Zenith that I might be overlooking.

* Updated 7/27/09: According to Zenith, they use 2 US-based sites for hosting off site data as well. The table was updated to reflect the correction.

Disaster Recovery Methods

After reading Karl Palachuk’s blog today – The Reality of Offsite Backup – I thought maybe the discussion could be expanded to include some best practices for disaster recovery. I’ll start off with some of what we’re doing for our clients and I look forward to seeing what kind of comments we get.

So, see if you can guess which technologies are used for the three “backup & disaster recovery” options below. By the way, I know there are many more ways to provide this service. These three solutions seem to be prevalent in our area though.

Option A – Standard file-based backup solution with regular offsite storage of media:

1. Execute disaster recovery steps to call everyone and initiate access to an alternate worksite if necessary. 4 hours
2. Replace any lost/damaged equipment. 2-4 business days minimum depending on requirements and vendors.
3. Bring offsite media to recovery location. 2-4 hours
4. Reinstall operating system on replacement equipment. 2-4 hours
5. Restore of the offsite data to the replaced/fixed equipment. 2-4 hours

Access to recovery systems: 3-5 days
Total disaster recovery time: 3-5 days

Option B – Offsite image replication without local recovery equipment:

1. Execute disaster recovery steps to call everyone and initiate access to an alternate worksite if necessary. 4 hours
2. Replace any lost/damaged equipment. 2-4 business days minimum depending on requirements and vendors.
3. Request for offsite data to be shipped to recovery location on BDR appliance. 24-48 hours
4. Virtualize failed server until permanent recovery equipment is available. 1 hour
   
5. (After Hours) Restore of the offsite data to the replaced/fixed equipment. 2-4 hours
   

Access to recovery systems: 2-3 days
Total disaster recovery time: 3-5 days

Option C – Offsite replication with offsite mount of image as virtual machine and RDP access:

1. Execute disaster recovery steps to call everyone and initiate access to an alternate worksite if necessary. 4 hours
2. Initiate offsite backup image mount on a hosted virtual machine. Provide RDP access to systems as necessary either in existing location or an alternate disaster recovery site. 1-2 hours
   
3. Replace or fix any lost/damaged equipment with local parts, rental servers or cold spares. 2-4 hours
   
4. Request for offsite data to be shipped to recovery location on BDR appliance. 24-48 hours
5. (After Hours) Take remote virtual machine offline and allow BDR appliance to replicate deltas. 2-4 hours
   
6. (After Hours) Restore of the offsite data to the replaced/fixed equipment. 2-4 hours

Access to recovery systems: 4-6 hours
Total disaster recovery time: 3-5 days

Option A uses BackupExec (or similar) with a rotation of weekly offsite drives. Since you’re not doing a CDP you’ll be losing any data since your last offsite transfer. How critical is that data? It would be better to take media offsite daily, but you’re still losing a lot of data in a disaster potentially. Besides busy clients don’t like to mess with tapes or USB drives every day and you end up with missed backups as a result.

Option B is the standard Zenith BDR solution. It’s better than “we’ll back up the most critical 24 GB of data” but has some drawbacks. The first is the amount of time it takes to get replacement equipment. The second is the loss of control over offsite data.

We’ve learned that Option C is better and doesn’t require much more investment. Option C could be a Datto Viridian solution if you don’t have your own offsite hosting facility. If you have somewhere to replicate data to over the internet you might choose a Zenith Arca or SonicWall CDP solution. The trick with Option C is providing immediate access to systems via mounting the backup images. Of course good internet connectivity is required for the RDP to work. This is relatively new technology and you’ll find Sun Virtualbox in this space among others.

In addition, you need to consider whether you'll have personnel available to perform critical functions, where you're going to put them, access to critical services (phone, fax, internet, etc.) in the recovery location and a slew of other items.

It rapidly gets complicated so you absolutely have to plan it out, develop a solution and not just slap together a few technologies and hope it works.

So, how are you doing disaster recovery? Are you providing DR consulting in addition to data backup & recovery? Do you do the DR consulting yourself or outsource it? Do you have a better backup option than we’ve discussed? Maybe you just have comments on one of the technologies I mention.

Let us know your thoughts!

Scott Cameron
Redwood Network Services, Inc.
www.redwoodnetworks.com