Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ
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I have never used a so-called Enterprise (paid) backup solution with Zmanda or Bacula. I think for this post I want to focus on Zmanda instead of Bacula... the wording of Bacula kinda pushes me away in that every little thing having to do with it is a "plugin".
The way Zmanda Enterprise is described on their website, it makes them look so fantastically perfect that it would make anyone want to shoot themselves for even the slightest thought of something more expensive like Unitrends or Veeam.
So what I'm wondering, is if Zmanda does it all, and more, than Unitrends and Veeam Backup, for a lot less money... then how are backup solutions like Unitrends and Veeam in business? (lets leave the other stuff like replication and veeam monitor out of it for this)
I know it's a software solution, so you'd still have to provide the hardware, capacity, etc for the backups and such... and licensing is still per device or cpu.
So what are the convincing reasons to not go with Zmanda for a large enterprise backup solution with lots of hypervisors, lots of physical Linux and Windows servers, databases, etc. Lets say all raw data would be in the mid-20's of terabytes. Tape backups would be in play, and eventual cloud backup. Backup copies (backup replication) wouldn't be a factor at this point.
All products do have paid support options. I don't know how good the support of Zmanda would be vs Unitrends or Veeam, as I've heard and lived through bad stories regarding all of them.
Can you convince me Zmanda is not for me, and another popular solution is better for the company? Can you convince me Zmanda is better for me and Unitrends/Veeam/etc... would be worse choice for the company? Why?
Management sometimes does quick searches and see open source!, or free!, or does everything XYZ can do and more! and think, hey let's present this instead!
Anyways, by looks and features alone, I don't see why I shouldn't be sold on Zmanda vs XYZ, unless there's more of a potential to be stuck without good working backups and/or retention, lack of support, or worse utilization of hardware and/or capacity.
Thoughts?
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Have never used it. I would look at price comparisons against StorageCraft, only because they seem like a more direct competitor. But if the price is right, I've not heard of any issues with Zmanda.
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I just noticed that Zmanda and Amanda are part of Carbonite now.
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We used to use Zmanda, used to. Support told me that "Those backups are fine." Reality was different. Testing saved my bacon, and we switched to using CrashPlan (the free one) after that support incident.
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@travisdh1 said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
We used to use Zmanda, used to. Support told me that "Those backups are fine." Reality was different. Testing saved my bacon, and we switched to using CrashPlan (the free one) after that support incident.
What happened to your Zmanda backups? Were they corrupted? I seen that they use zip or tar for compression and does deduplication. What's your experience with that?
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@Tim_G said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
@travisdh1 said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
We used to use Zmanda, used to. Support told me that "Those backups are fine." Reality was different. Testing saved my bacon, and we switched to using CrashPlan (the free one) after that support incident.
What happened to your Zmanda backups? Were they corrupted? I seen that they use zip or tar for compression and does deduplication. What's your experience with that?
The backups were throwing errors, and whenever one of the errors happened on a backup job, that backup file was corrupted and unreadable by the software.
It could be different today, this was around 5 years ago that this happened to me/us.
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I looked at this when it was Amanda backup and it was free. That was years ago and back then i dont think i had enough xp to use it properly. Also at the time the job was all Windows environment.
Zmanda looks like it has become much more robust over the last 7-10 years. However, looks like they still dont support Server 2012R2/2016
http://www.zmanda.com/pricing.html#ASP -
You need a hypervisor license ($300) and a per VM license? Boy, that can add up quickly. Veeam small business the last time I looked was like $800 and $130/yr support/update renewal. Doesn't take many VMs to climb over that. And supports unlimited VMs on up to three hosts (basically it matches VMWares Essential package).
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@Dashrender said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
You need a hypervisor license ($300) and a per VM license? Boy, that can add up quickly. Veeam small business the last time I looked was like $800 and $130/yr support/update renewal. Doesn't take many VMs to climb over that. And supports unlimited VMs on up to three hosts (basically it matches VMWares Essential package).
No Veeam Backup Essentials is sold per 2 processors. Always has been. So three, two processor servers, were $2400, not $800. The current price is $950 MSRP.
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@JaredBusch said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
@Dashrender said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
You need a hypervisor license ($300) and a per VM license? Boy, that can add up quickly. Veeam small business the last time I looked was like $800 and $130/yr support/update renewal. Doesn't take many VMs to climb over that. And supports unlimited VMs on up to three hosts (basically it matches VMWares Essential package).
No Veeam Backup Essentials is sold per 2 processors. Always has been. So three, two processor servers, were $2400, not $800. The current price is $950 MSRP.
Oh, thanks OK, even so, a single host can hold dozens or more of VMs..
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@Dashrender said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
You need a hypervisor license ($300) and a per VM license? Boy, that can add up quickly. Veeam small business the last time I looked was like $800 and $130/yr support/update renewal. Doesn't take many VMs to climb over that. And supports unlimited VMs on up to three hosts (basically it matches VMWares Essential package).
"VM Pricing (Only available with Standard and Premium Subscriptions): Each Zmanda Client subscription allows up to 5 virtual machines (VMs) running on one physical server. All VMs must have the same operating system as the client subscription purchased. For example, if you have 2 physical machines running 3 Linux and 3 Windows VMs on the first machine and 5 Linux VMs on the second machine, you need to purchase subscription to 1 Zmanda Client for Linux, 1 Zmanda Client for Windows for the first machine and 1 Zmanda Client for Linux for the second machine. "
But still, not supporting two major OS's from this decade is a huge reason not to go with them. In fact, I didn't even see that because I figured it was an "of course" thing.
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@momurda said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
Zmanda looks like it has become much more robust over the last 7-10 years. However, looks like they still dont support Server 2012R2/2016
http://www.zmanda.com/pricing.html#ASPWow, looks like they gave up long ago and are just riding it out until people catch on and stop paying them.
RHEL... update to date.
CentOS.... same as above (literally)
Solaris 10.... means that they gave up in 2011 there
Fedora.... we are four versions past support (on 25 now.)
Oracle... again, just RHEL listed a third time
Suse... that's the old version, not current
OpenSuse.... so old we've not seen that numbering system in a long time
Ubuntu.... two years and four versions since they gave up
Mac OSX... only one version old, this is almost up to date, sort of
Windows.... Half a decade since they had support.Wow. It literally looks like they closed up shop and gave up about half a decade ago. I think this product is over and done. Who could buy this today? Pure CentOS shops I guess. No serious Mac, Windows, Suse, Solaris, Fedora, Ubuntu shop or anyone with mixed loads could consider it. Good to know that Windows 2000 and CentOS 5 are covered, though, should you need to time travel to the last last decade to run a novelty IT shop.
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well if you need to backup only Windows 10 environments..... but I assume that there are better more supported options available
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@DustinB3403 said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:
well if you need to backup only Windows 10 environments..... but I assume that there are better more supported options available
Veeam, free and it's made this century.
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For Windows you could hope they were just lazy and didn't list 2012R2....
But it is missing 2016... How long has that been out now? -
@Tim_G If you need a truly enterprise and FLOSS backup software, just try Bacula or BareOS.
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I keep hearing good things about Bacula.
