It is really not a versus. These are two distinct Exchange backup and recover functions.
I have not read the article yet but want to make sure that everyone knows the deleted items folder does not related to the recover deleted items folder. There appears to be some confusion on what capabilities are in Exchange. Even if you empty your deleted items folder the items are still in the "recover deleted items area" for whatever time period your Exchange is setup for. You can get to the recover deleted items area by viewing your deleted items folder then the Tools pull down will have a "recover deleted items" option. In fact, when your mailbox is out of space and cannot figure out why, it is probably that your recover deleted items folder area has a lot of stuff in it. You can delete items from it. Now, as for using Veritas' or Commvault's capability to recover mail boxes that is a business decision. But, no matter what you still have to run regular Exchange backups to be able to recover your Exchange stores as well as the mailbox backup. Yes, two backups. When you have 5,000 mailboxes it is simple, mailbox backup is so slow it is totally useless. So, you start to limit what mailboxes you need to backup to executives, less than 2 percent of the number or 100. We went down the Veritas path of mailbox backup about 5 minutes and figured out it is not feasible. We have not investigated Commvault, but what ever you do, mailbox backup/restore is not a replacement for TDP for Exchange or other vendor's Exchange store backup/restore capabilities. The main reasons, it is not going to bring things back exactly the way they were before. Notably, a total new copy of the emails are created during the restore. The issue here is Microsoft will never provide an API for this that will perform because it is simply a low yield no monetary value to them. Let's face it we have turned the mail system into a bunch of private data repositories. Everyone does it. They have replaced their paper with electronic for the most part. Until Redmond thinks they can make some money at fixing the problem their argument is mailbox restore is not needed. Their software is never going to have a problem where the customer needs to restore a mailbox and if they do, they will use their "procedure" to recover it. Remember, we finance all their fixes. They always make sure they create at least 10 nasty bugs that will not be fixed until the next release which we will gladly pay for. There was a question about Veritas install versus TSM install in this document. NetBackup is probably easier to get an initial install, but tuning it is a daily nightmare. TSM takes longer to install but once installed it just works with about 5 rule of thumb settings in the dsmserv.sys, dsm.sys, dsm.opt. Having been deeply involved in both products, the answer to the questions is simple. Just look at the names of the products. Netbackup (Veritas) and Storage Manager (Tivoli). I joke that it is NetBackup, no restore. Actually, Netbackup just does not scale up for large environments without spending lots of money on hardware based on what we have seen. The main reasons we are dissatisfied with Netbackup is support is lousy, it could not scale in the NT world, and there is no deleted file policy to protect data from being lost. The bottom line, we had TSM about 7 years ago for NT and UNIX on an OS/390 server, replaced with ArcServe, replaced with Netbackup, and now back to TSM on an AIX server. So far, I can clearly say the architecture of TSM is vastly superior in the Storage Management arena and backup and restore times are acceptably equivalent to Netbackup. The real kicker is the price tag of Netbackup is significantly more expensive when configured correctly. -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Wichmann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 8:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: TDP for exchange vs Veritas hot backups That article is certainly a good read. But what I got out of it was that deleted item retention is also fairly useless. If a mailbox is deleted at all (via accident by an admin or on purpose because an employee left), it is painful to restore it (restore entire server to a separate box method). Even if mail is deleted, it seems to me a lot of times it's lost forever. As soon as you empty your deleted items folder (something users do all the time), you can no longer retrieve that email. That makes it pretty easy to still make individual mail restores a desirable feature. I've never heard of the IBM Content Manager. Anyone have any experience with what it is and how it helps in this case? So all in all the only reason one might argue the TDP for Exchange is better then the Veritas solution is performance in restores and backups. Does anyone have real numbers on how much better it is in this case? I've found this argument to be pretty weak amongst customers chosing between Veritas and TSM as a backup solution. Exchange always seems to be an important piece influencing their decision and they would gladly give up performance and gain the higher level of granularity. -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Bill Mansfield Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 1:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: TDP for exchange vs Veritas hot backups This topic should generate some interest <g> The cited analysis is interesting, but out of date (V3.7.2). Also, the methodology is suspect, especially considering a Veritas engineer was onsite to set up NBU but they set up TSM from the manuals. There is a readable and comprehensive article on Exchange 5.5 deleted object restore at http://www.exchangeadmin.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7922&Key=Outlo ok%20Deleted%20Items As I understand it, the admin enables the "deleted items cache" and deleted emails live there awhile, easily restorable by the user. If this facility isn't enabled or doesn't work, the Microsoft supported approach for getting deleted mail back is to restore the entire Exchange server on another box. Not good. Veritas and some others use a messaging interface to capture emails and back them up. This interface was never intended for backup, and is very slow for both backup and restore. But it does work, and the vendors do keep up with Microsoft breakage. At the last IBM storage conference, this came up, and the recommended approach was to use IBM Content Manager CommonStore for Exchange Server. If anybody has done this perhaps you could post results. _____________________________ William Mansfield Senior Consultant Solution Technology, Inc "Malbrough, Demetrius" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <DMalbrough@TT cc: IINC.COM> Subject: Re: TDP for exchange vs Veritas hot backups Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] IST.EDU> 12/21/2001 02:15 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" Also, Gerald! This may be off the topic but there was a nice analysis done on TSM vs. Veritas! You can view it at: http://www.keylabs.com/results/veritas/veritas.html Regards, Demetrius Malbrough UNIX/TSM Administrator -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Wichmann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 1:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: TDP for exchange vs Veritas hot backups I find this is the hardest thing to sell among potential customers who are considering both platforms (TSM vs Veritas). The reason tends to be that Veritas's hotbackup solution will do a higher level of granularity in restores - something companies in our experience definetly prefer. Being able to restore a mailbox seems to weigh heavily in favor of Veritas - or at least that's been my experience. Now I know some of the arguments against it. E.g. it's not officially supported my Microsoft and therefore if Microsoft makes a change to the backup API or to Exchange, it could break their hot backups altogether. This argument I find is of limited use because most companies who've been using it have never experienced this problem and can easily argue right back that Veritas will quickly patch the product such that it does work. One of the arguments regarding mailbox restores is also to use Microsoft's deleted retention parameter so that the exchange server holds onto deleted messages for a period of time before officially purging them. That way they are recoverable without having to do a restore of the server. My understanding of this feature though is to do a mailbox recovery, it is still very painful and involves another exchange server? I would love it if someone more knowledgable could give me the low-down on how the deleted retention actually works when a mail or mailbox needs to be recovered once it was deleted. How do you go about recovering them? Another argument is the speed of backups and restores. My understanding is Veritas's hotback up much slower to do backups and restore. However I've never seen any numbers nor have I had the opportunity to test this myself. Exactly how big a difference is this? Does anyone have any real tests or numbers or is this also a fairly week argument? Thanks for the help!
