Netbackup to Simpana migration

[brk6971]

My company is looking into migration from Netbackup to Simpana. From what we have read and heard Simpana has all the features and functionality of NBU but is easier to manage and will give us better ROI, success on backups and free up staff to work on other things.

If anyone has made the switch from NBU to Simpana and cares to share their experience/opinions it would be greatly appreciated. ( If you perfer to comment offline I can send you my email or phone #)

Looking for Feedback on:
support model and overall satisfaction with the technical expertise, response and follow through.
Overall satisfation with Simpana.

We have a very large complex enterprise environment:
Multiple sites
Lots of firewalls
Several hundred TB of Data
Encryption
De duplication
Offsite storage
Replication
Almost every OS
SQL
DB2
Oracle 9I and 10G (very large)
NetApp filers w/ millions and millions of small files using NDMP
VMware w/ VCB proxy backups
Exchange using snapshots and off host backups.
STK SL8500 libraries
ACSLS

Thanks in advance

 

[cbwfq]

We moved from BackupExec to Commvault. We are a small shop but I will answer any questions if I can.

 

[CraigMcGill]

Being a site of your size you should ask CommVault for reference sites. They will happily provide them. Go to those sites and ask detailed questions of them. Have a look at their setups.

I suggest that getting advice here is not the way forward for a site of your size.

 

[theravager]

Interesting the reasons while you are migrating we are considering migrating the other way for exactly the same reasons.

Netbackup has heaps more features then CV and the tech is way more mature.

 

[CraigMcGill]

> we are considering migrating the other way

Oh well, if money is no object...

 

[brk6971]

You are considering moving off of Simpana and to Netbackup? what is driving your decision?

 

[theravager]

Its cheaper, symantec is happily offering to supply everything for free at our current maintenance cost.

CV account management has been dismal the last 12 months as well despite complaits.

Pretty much the old we have this customer no interest scenario that vendors do when they get complacent.

Also some of the pricing they want of some of agents isn't ridiculous its downright insulting, costs more in time and money dithering around telling sales to wake up to themselves and try taking 80% of the price they ask first time around.

Other major consideration is CV archiving and dedup is so behind the tech curve its not funny.

 

[baddos]

Yeah commvault sales team leaves much to be desired, but I would never go back to netbackup.

 

[brk6971]

What are the benefits that you find w/ Commvault and why would you not go back to NBU?

 

[baddos]

I haven't used netbackup in forever (at least 6 years) so I can't really comment on how the two current products compare. At the time though my reliability increased dramatically and Veritas company at the time was incredibly terrible in the customer service department.

 

[theravager]

I'd say netbackup has a pretty big edge on tech, particularly around newer tech such as archiving and dedup.

Other then that the products are pretty much the same, CV is easier to use but netbackup can do a lot more advanced stuff, ROI in a very large enterprise NBU would definately better, in a small enterprise the ez of CV would be a winner admin costwise.

If I was a new enterprise company selecting a product it would probibly come down to the best deal particularly around locking in ongoing costs and maintenance.

If you have real good techheads i would definately go nbu, if you got the casual person that has IT in their job description i'd go CV.

Prob the big one is enterprise vault (not thats it part of NBU) is so far ahead of CV mail archiving that its not even worthwhile trying to compare. And you can roll that in with your maintenance.

 

[birky]

Hi theravager

different environments..different solutions suit the best

Please don't take this the wrong way but, I'm interested to know if you have actually administered NBU in a large environment..if not then you are in for some interesting times...get ready to devote your life to data management ;-)

I used it in one of the primary telco's (migrated to it from Legato) and I would definately not agree that NBU is way ahead of CVLT...all the marketing hype would lead you to believe that it was though.

I would never freely want to go back to spending all my time managing NBU, writing scripts, trawling through many logs to troubleshoot etc (granted we were a Solaris shop but, that's where NBU is supposed to be at it's best)

CV works extremely well if configured correctly...we are seeing dedupe reduction down to about 20% and email archiving does what it say's it will do, moves the old data off exchange while still allowing users to recall..not a seperate product altogether to manage with a huge storage footprint

Anyone can 'drop their pants' to give the best deal now but, you have to make sure that you look at the ongoing costs after the first 12 months as well as training costs etc etc to actually start using the solution to it's full potential ;-)





Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer