I have been trying to find the perfect backup solution for our fairly small network. Although we do not have a ton of servers or huge amount of users, we are located in a disaster-prone area and require a quick recovery time and fail-safe offsite backup.
Our hardware setup is as follows:
- Windows 2008r2 Server as ADDC, DHCP, DNS, NPA, VPN
- Windows 2008r2 Server as File, Print, WSUS, Backup
- VMWare vSphere 5 Essentials w/ 5-10 Windows and Linux guests
- QNAP TS-659 Pro II NAS as Backup Destination
- Imation USB RDX Drive as Backup Destination
Our requirements are as follows:
- Centralized Backup destination
- Incremental Backup to NAS
- Incremental Backup to Offsite "Cloud"
- Snapshot Backup to RDX Cartridge
- Selective Bare Metal Backup
- Agentless VMWare vSphere Backup
- Active Directory aware backup for Windows Server 2008r2
Optional, but would be nice:
- P2V
- CDP
- Deduplication
- Windows XP/7 Workstation backup
I have been testing Acronis Backup & Recovery VE 2011, which fits the bill almost perfectly, except it has very bad RDX support. It seems to only allow local backups to RDX, which is not very useful.
I've also tried Vembu StoreGrid which is a very cost effective solution, except that I hate the fact that it installs Apace Server on every machine along with it's client or server. I'm trying to keep my DC's as clean as possible and I think installing any type of web server defeats that.
