Full-featured online backup providers for medium-sized enterprise? [closed]

I've been banging my head against the wall trying to find an online backup service that supports all of the following enterprisey features:

• Full-system backup for Linux and Windows 2003/2008 servers, including windows registries, System State, Active Driectory, etc. This requirement knocks out most of the well-known online players.
• Encryption with locally-controlled keys
• De-duplication, with a sane and hopefully adjustable retention policy. Two weeks is not enough. We have a 45 Mbps connection at HQ, and about 5 TB uncompressed in 10M files to back up. Some individual files are as large as 150 GB (MSSQL and Exchange databases). This implies bandwidth-efficiency.
• Support for SQL Server 2005/2008 and Exchange 2007/2010 backups via Windows Volume ShadowCopy Services. (Again, almost none of the online services do this well, and the "dump to a native file and then back that up" scheme just doesn't work for 150-GB databases.)
• Reasonable filesystem metadata support, including restoration, with Windows and Linux permissions being a must. (Shockingly missing from many online providers).
• Gruanular Sharepoint item restore is a highly desired feature, but we can live without it.
• Offers pay-as-you-go, all-opex pricing without "reserving" space like Mozy.
• Is not BackupExec, which we just cannot trust anymore to do an actual restore. Downloading multi-GB service releases and doing QA and installation on those every few weeks has become untenable. Yet another once-great product Symantec has destroyed.
• Reasonable success/failure reporting with enough information to track down what data was missed or skipped (again, most of the online players fail massively in this area).
• Ability to restore data (and hopefully System State) into a public cloud in a DR scenario (knocks out the VMware-specific solutions which looked otherwise promising).

I've taken trials or read in depth about CrashPlan, Mozy, JungleDisk, Carbonite, i365, and a few others. But even the "server" or "pro" versions of these services is lacking one or more "table-stakes" features that all business-oriented, premise-based backup software has had for ages. Note we are not looking for free or even inexpensive here, just something that works well and is reliable without a lot of care and feeding.

Solution 1:

I had done my research on the very same subject about half year ago and I ended up with Asigra solution. It can do EVERYTHING that you are asking and more. Asigra makes software but service is provided by independent service providers and there is no shortage of them. Ask Asigra for referrals or just Google. I could refer you to mine if you like (they pay commissions for referrals so I may make a buck or two for doing this :-).

There is minor annoyance with their solution that you will need separate installations for Windows and Linux backups, but this is not a big deal and they may fix (or rather re-inroduce) it in the next version.

It is not a one click solution because it provides so many options and it will require some understanding of backups. You sound knowledgeable so I presume it wouldn't be a problem :-). Once it is set it just runs. In addition it provides rather advanced reporting useful for trend analysis and capacity planning.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

It seems like you have done a lot of research on this and every service has been found to come up wanting :( Thinking of this in another way, is there a reason why you'd like to use an online service like this? I wonder if a more suitable option for you might be to have a remote cloud server running your favourite flavour of Linux with bacula installed? Your storage could be S3 or similar. I believe you would then have most of the items you list above taken care of. If you do find a service like you describe, I would be really interested to know.

Solution 3:

Not an online provider per se, but if you do need the abilities you listed, I'd suggest having an off-site SAN somewhere, and use the SAN vendor's replication feature to push your on-site SAN's content to the off-site one.

After all, that's what my company chose to use. Our on-site NetApp cluster replicates to an off-site NetApp cluster, and every weekend both clusters do the time-consuming de-dupe.

No need for a full-blown DRC; my company just rent a rack on a trustworthy colocation provider, with 2 Public IP Addresses.

Yes, the upfront cost might be immense, but the operational cost is quite low. Plus we have the peace of mind knowing that if our colo provider goes belly-up, we won't lose our replicated data.