travis' brain dump

This one falls into the tech posts kiddos so if you’re looking for humor, personal info, a rant or if your head hurts when you read my tech posts…. skip it. 🙂

As you could tell from my relief post yesterday we’re in the middle of deploying CommVault (site) software across our entire company as well as ExaGrid (site) disk-based systems in two of our seven primary backup locations. As I’m sure this post will be picked up by search engines I hope it’s a good base for anyone who may be looking at either of these products to get some first hand info from someone who just switched over and is in the middle of deployment. Also it’s good to get the feel of how things are in the infant stage of a deployment since this is when most of the headaches are.

I’ll start with ExaGrid since it’s going to be the shortest description since it’s that cut and dried, they don’t mess around. The deployment of the Denver site took all of 30 minutes. That includes rack time kiddos. My only complaint was the rails for the devices. They were not the best but hey, when you’re comparing them to the ease of HP rails…. yeah… Soo…. on to the deployment. If you can read you can roll this thing out. I’m dead serious. It’s that easy. It only requires the following skills:

1) Can you read?
2) Can you count?
3) Do you have a basic understanding of what an IP address is?
4) Do you have a basic understanding of what a file share is?

That’s it. Seriously. A monkey could put this thing in and get it ready to talk to any number of backup solutions. This product gets mad props for deployment and setup ease. In the support department, I did actually have to call support because of a dumb oversight on my end. Read: USER ERROR. 🙂 Somehow when we were setting up the storage policies for CommVault Galaxy we selected their “Single Instance Storage” component on stuff going to the ExaGrid. Don’t. Not only are you going to make your ExaGrid extremely unhappy but you’re trying to defeat the purpose of the wonderful deduplication process of the device. Big note: MAKE SURE YOU NEVER ENABLE SIS IN GALAXY WHEN CONFIGURING WITH EXAGRID. 🙂 Back to the subject of support, AWESOME. I love being able to call support and not get some guy in another country who I can’t understand. I’m sorry folks, but the last thing I want to do when I am having problems with a computer is make a call into support and need an freakin translator just to solve a simple problem. ExaGrid gets huge applause for their support.

The Report Card says:

Deployment:  A+
Ease of Use:   A+
Support:         A+

I also have to say the first run results of our ExaGrid unit are quite awesome. The deduplication statistics are well above what I expected as we’re showing almost a 2:1 depulication ratio across our site. For more detailed terms, we have 5,585.04 GB of data we’re backing up first run and it’s only consuming 3,048.30 GB. As it sits, it appears we’ll be able to backup even more data than we previously thought possible just because of the way this system works. So… in addition to the scores above:

Functionaility: A+

This moves us on to CommVault Galaxy. Wow. That’s the first words out of my mouth. You know all that stuff you know about ArcServ, BackupExec, etc etc?  Throw it out the window because it’s useless and honestly was just wasting your brain cells. Once you’ve cleared your mind and centered your Chi prepare to enter the realm of Galaxy. Ok, so that was a little over the top but you get what I’m saying. I had to rethink how I saw backups once I walked into this product and not in the bad way. I have to say for our setup of 1 local site and 6 remote sites for backups, this was the ABSOLUTE BEST CHOICE. To sit here in Denver and manage backups across the company without having to open up multiple desktops and play switch the screen… Priceless.

We had some bumps getting things started up but I have to say considering all things, it went really smooth. A little back story here… Our previous product, ArcServ (*cough*crap*cough*) kept blowing up during backup jobs over the last few weeks here and left us pretty much holding an empty bag right about the time our equipment and software showed up. Not to mention the fact that it completely crapped out on us because our tape library decided to have a fit about one of it’s drives. It flat refused to run any backups with a drive out because the library kept throwing errors. Mind you it never crashed, it just constantly displayed an error. Despite the fact we didn’t have professional services coming in to help roll out the product until Tuesday and Quantum wouldn’t be in until Monday to fix the library, I couldn’t wait. I pulled everything out, hooked it all up and went to setting it up. Having never setup this product before I actually had a crippled tape library *RUNNING* backups within a day. Granted, Galaxy flat told me ‘ you’ve got issues ‘ but hey, it was way more informative than our previous software and actually offered way better diagnostics and ways around those issues. So we ran a backup through the weekend here and had at least some data to rely on thanks to Galaxy.

Once professional services came in on Tuesday I was schooled in the error of my thinking in all the right ways. Boy did I over complicate things when I setup that job to run over the weekend. Why did I do this? I kept thinking like I was using one of the other products. So once I got centered and cleared my mind I was shown the path to righteousness and mended my ways. All is now well in client policy land. I wish I could sit here for an hour or two and list off all the features I find cool about this product but I really don’t have the time right now. I just can’t say enough how much this product makes sense to use. It just works.

The Report Card Says:

Deployment:  A+
Ease of Use:   A+
Support:         A+
Functionality: A+

With all that behind me I’m sitting here today just breathing a sigh of relief. Our backups here in Denver and out in Tulsa are working properly and I’m looking forward to moving the deployment forward over the next couple of weeks to get the rest of our sites online and operational. It’s going to be a lot of hard work but I think at this point the hardest part is going to be just getting the hardware online, lol.

Again, a huge amount of kudos goes out to the support personal from ExaGrid (Stefan and Dave), CommVault (Don) and Lewan (Doug and Terrance) and a huge thank you to Greg as well who was on the spot any time I needed him this week to rally the troops while we worked through some little quirks and such here and there. You rock man! (and Happy Birthday)