I'll start with a Positive and say that I do like the way Unitrends (Recovery 822) does it's Incremental forevers and that you can install all the clients you want. It's not perfect, but it does work well. Unitrends Support is always very helpful and one of the better support groups that I have dealt with.
Now for the negatives: We are doing a D2D2T. We have to have a full weekly, Monthly and yearly done that stay offsite for quite some time. The D2D works well, but the trouble begins when you go to tape. First off Unitrends does not use the Bar codes of a tape library. What it seems to do is when you start the archive, you tell it what tapes to use (ie 1-7). It will then load each tape and read the Media Serial Number of the tape. This is an internal number that is quite long. when you open the archive job all the long MSNs are listed in there (comma seperated). It can be rather messy trying to view the numbers. The problem with this is that 1. The tape library does not use these numbers, 2. We (people) do not use these number and 3. our offsite storage do not use these numbers. This now makes it rather difficult to recall the appropriate tapes when we need to get them from our offsite storage company.
There has got to be a better way to handle this. When it comes to auditing and recalling the tapes, it can be quite the nightmare.
Another issue we have is since we can not use our nice Quantum Scalar i80 with 2 fiber channel LTO-5 drives (since fiber channel isn't supported yet), we are stuck using an older PowerVault 124T with 1 LTO-4 SAS drive in it. We need to archive 6.5tb of data which takes 48 hours to complete. The PowerVault 124T has 2 magazines a Left (tapes 1-8) and a Right (Tapes 9-16). Our most recent archive failed a few times since there were only tapes in slot 9-16 and the unitrends reversed the numbering for some reason. Now it see 9-16 as 1-8 and 1-8 as 9-16. Yes confusing and it really messes up any automation.
Now that we have that out of the way, I would love to find out how any of you archive with Unitrends. How much data you archive, how often and how long does it take. Also what do you archive to? Tape or drives? What is the archive unit?
Has anyone else run into the issues I've mentioned above or have any answers to this. I currently have a support ticket open and am hoping to get a little more light shed on the subject tomorrow.
Thanks in Advance!