Evault

Backups, Restores, tapes, libraries, disks, disaster recovery...What does it all mean!!! Well if you don't know, you will most certainly find out the hard way when your supervisor requests a SQL database from last night's backup.

Evault provides online backup and disk to disk backup and recovery services, compliance and archiving.

I have been an Evault customer for several years using the Infostage product. Prior to Evault I used tapes in accompaniment with Backup Exec. The problem with tapes - for us was that they were becoming more difficult to track, expensive, unreliable, and time consuming. Everyday, an hour or so was dedicated to tape management, labeling, and working with our offsite vendor to collect and store the tapes for DR purposes.

We use the Evault Infostage product. Basically a local "vault" is stored at our primary site with a secondary "vault" offsite. Backed up are Windows servers, MS SQL, MS Exchange, and AIX. Evault has "Agents" that are installed on each host that are to be backed up. They also support UNC paths so for instance, you could install an agent on a Windows Server and use that agent to back up UNC paths on other shares..etc.

The first backup is the "seed" and every backup after that is the "delta" or changes in the file. For the Infostage product we actually have two backups that run each night, a HQ backup then a DR site backup. During the initial purchase, we didn't have any enterprise storage at the time. We purchased servers with enough storage to backup our data. Recently, we installed an iSCSI SAN and have allocated space for backup storage when we need it.

Because we have grown over the past few years, we are learning that what we need is vault replication to cut down on backup windows. I've contacted Evault about this and they now offer an enterprise vault backup. This would eliminate running a second backup and shorten our backup window. Backups would simply run at HQ then replicate to the DR site.

Evault provides Windows, Exchange, SQL, Oracle, *IX agents. The backups have an impressive compression ratio, and if your concerned about security -there are multiple ways to encrypt your data. There are also multiple backup retention policies, multiple ways to restore your data and archive older data to tape if necessary. Please note that to backup your data offsite, it obviously requires adequate bandwidth depending on the amount of data. This is true for any vendor with the ability to backup off site.

My experience with Evault has been excellent. Data is being backed up efficiently. It's fast and restores take minutes rather than several hours waiting for your archiving vendor to bring back your tape and then catalog and restore. Support is great and they offer plenty of documentation in their knowledge base. If your in the market for an enterprise backup product, I highly recommend Evault.