what kind of backup am i looking for?

[lsi]

so I ran across a customer that bought a datto appliance but then they cancelled the monthly service subscription. Basically they only wanted to be able to spin up the unit locally for failover but didn't care about the offsite replication at all. I mentioned this somewhere else and someone mentioned that they may as well have gone out and just installed shadowprotect on their own box? Is this what Shadowprotect does? Do you install it on your own backup server and an agent on your main server and can you do an immediate failover?

 

[e2346437]

You install ShadowProtect Server on your server, and you can use it to write an image out to some sort of external storage. They also have a component that will FTP an image offsite.

If your server fails, you can do a bare-metal restore from the ShadowProtect image to a new box. It's not immediate, but it's fairly fast. You can also convert the ShadowProtect image file to a virtual image file that you can boot under VMWare or Hyper-V.

The advantage of Datto is that you can spin up the virtual machine immediately, one the local box or in the cloud, or both, depending on your box and service level. It also tests the virtual image daily, there is all sorts of logging and reporting, and good tech support.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Datto uses StorageCraft as their backup software on the workstations/servers....a "tweaked" version called ShadowSnap.

But it's only the backup software. How it's controlled, the inverse chain technology, the virtualization, the test snap shots, and a whole fleet of other very cool features, is done by Datto on their appliances..and using plain vanilla StorageCraft alone doesn't get you that.

I never asked our rep if you can just purchase a Siris appliance and skip the offsite part, but "why" would you want to throw away so many features that come with the monthly. It's not just offsite storage, but it's also support, and it's also software updates to the appliance (often at least monthly).

 

[nesrinamb]

Just took a look online and their apparently is a local only option. But their still has to be a monthly subscription for Datto to support the device. I think that's fair. Or at least thats what I believe the monthly service is for since you don't get a cloud option with it.

The big thing with Datto is that you can easily backup all your servers off of one system and spin whichever one is needed. For you to do the same with shadow protect you would have needed to buy a second server and install something that can handle spinning up a vm. I actually did the math for this a while back simply because I was skeptical about Datto.

After looking at licensing and hardware cost everything ended up being almost double. Not to mention the fact that you completely take away the ability to login and just hit go.