Reliability? Can we say we're onto Stage 2?

I'm rather scared, and pleased, to say that we appear to have genuinely made it work - in my last few posts I was still sceptical that Backup Exec was just being nice to us, but it does appear it is genuinely now acting like a competent backup product.

One server has now been up for 27 days, and is still running backups quite happily, with 2,000 odd jobs run in that time (66 a day or so), and the CASO server just getting on with it's jobs and delegation. No more tears.

Our CPS system is still working - that's the most flawless part of Backup Exec I've seen. It's absolutely awesome - it says continuous protection, and it offers just that. We installed it, got over one hurdle of making it listen on a specific IP, and that was that. Our main file servers have just-below-real-time backups 24/7.

Our next challenge (Stage 2, which took 18 months to get to!) is to build a comprehensive reporting and restore testing infrastructure around the software. We want to know everything possible about what it does, so we can provide internal quality reports, ensure we meet SLAs and finally, but not least, ensure customers can be assured of regular, reliable backups.

Restore testing is often overlooked, but certainly not here! It is an essential, and core part of our plan to operate regular (hopefully scheduled) restore tests so we can be sure those backups actually work - as someone else we know found out to great cost - backing up isn't enough!

And now, for CPS...

Something truely amazing has started happening, as Backup Exec is *still* running, 6 days in, and it looks like we may have turned a corner with it in terms of making it think, act and work, like a competent backup solution.

As a result we've been able to look at other things - since my colleague tried the "CPS" or Continuous Protection Server part of Backup Exec some time ago, we found it was pretty good stuff - it worked straight out of the box, so we figured we'd give it a try - after all it would be more than a little useful if we could just replicate data from one site to another as part of a backup system, as it would boost our protection against failure of one of our key servers.

Installation of the CPS Server was easy, and worked first time. However, getting it to talk to our remote server was a little more difficult, as it's on a different subnet, and, as a bonus, the CPS Server also happens to have multiple NICs on different networks. To annoy us, CPS decided to pick the wrong IP to bind to (and there's no indication it will do this, nor any GUI to choose it).

It's OK though, easily fixed - with a famous registry edit to set a "PreferredAddress" on the CPS Server, and, on the CPS Machine being copied, changing it's "Gateway" address for the Veritas Software to be the IP of the CPS machine and not it's host name (even though it resolves to the same).

Right now we have a working CPS job doing the initial copy of our data, after which it should continuously protect... rock on.