Backup Exec


Veritas Backup Exec is a data protection software product designed for customers who have mixed physical and virtual environments, and who are moving to public cloud services. Supported platforms include VMware and Hyper-V virtualization, Windows and Linux operating systems, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud storage, among others. All management and configuration operations are performed with a single user interface. Backup Exec also provides integrated deduplication, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities and helps to manage multiple backup servers or multi-drive tape loaders.
Backup Exec has an installation process that is well automated. Installing Backup Exec 15 on a Windows Server 2012 R2 system takes around 30 minutes. The installation wizard can be started from the Backup Exec Installation Media or the management console to push agents out to the physical servers, Hyper-V/VMware virtual machines, application/database systems hosting Active Directory, Exchange, Oracle database, SQL, and other supported platforms.
With its client/server design, Backup Exec provides backup and restore capabilities for servers, applications and workstations across the network. Backup Exec recovers data, applications, databases, or systems, from an individual file, mailbox item, table object, to an entire server. Current versions of the software support Microsoft, VMware, and Linux, among a longer list of supported hardware and software.
When used with tape drives, Backup Exec uses the Microsoft Tape Format, which is also used by Windows NTBackup, backup utilities included in Microsoft SQL Server, and many other backup vendors and is compatible with BKF. Microsoft Tape Format was originally Maynard's proprietary backup Tape Format and was later licensed by Microsoft as Windows standard tape format. In addition, Microsoft also licensed and incorporated Backup Exec's backup engine into Windows NT, the server version of Windows.
In addition, Backup Exec's family of agents and options offer features for scaling the Backup Exec environment and extending platform and feature support. Backup Exec 20.6 is the latest version of Veritas’ backup and recovery software.

History

Within the “backup” portion of the data protection spectrum, one Veritas product, Backup Exec, has been in the market for more than two decades. Since the early days of Microsoft’s journey to turn its Windows Server into the world’s dominant client-server operating system, Backup Exec has been one of a handful of technologies to protect it. As the WinSvr OS grew to become a platform of choice for application enablement and user productivity, Backup Exec’s media/platform support, application support, and internal operation evolved at a similar pace.
Backup Exec has a long history of successive owner-companies. Its earliest roots stretch back to the early 1980s when Maynard Electronics wrote a bundle of software drivers to help sell their tape-drive products.

Core components

The core components that are contained in a basic Backup Exec architecture include the following:
Backup Exec Agents and Options expand the features and functionality of core Backup Exec server to support the most common server applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, Oracle, Windows and Linux clients, server OSs, and the Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors. Not all agents are agents in the traditional sense. For example, the Agent for VMware and Hyper-V is not carrying out the backup process. The agent is simply collecting meta data so that Backup Exec can perform granular recoveries directly from storage at a point in the future - no mounting required.
Here is a list of Backup Exec Agents and Options:
AgentsOptions
Agent for VMware and Hyper-VDeduplication Option
Agent for Applications and DatabasesEnterprise Server Option
Agent for WindowsNDMP Option
Agent for Mac Library Expansion Option
Agent for LinuxVirtual Tape Library Unlimited Drive Option
Remote Media Agent for Linux

Installation

Backup Exec and its options can be installed on a local computer, a remote computer, within a virtual environment, or on a public cloud "Infrastructure as a Service " virtualization platform. Today Backup Exec supports the Backup Exec server installation on 64-bit operating systems only. However, the Agent for Windows can be installed on 32-bit operating systems. Several methods are available for installing Backup Exec. An Environment Check runs automatically during installation to make sure that the installation process can complete. If Backup Exec finds any configuration issues that can be fixed during the installation, or that may prevent Installation, warnings appear.
Backup Exec can be installed using the following:
Additionally, Backup Exec installation media also has a Remote Administrator feature which can be installed on a remote computer or workstation to administer the Backup Exec server remotely.
Backup Exec may install the additional products:
Backup Exec installations can have one or more Backup Exec servers, which are responsible for moving data from one or more locations to a storage medium, including cloud, disk, tape, and OST device. The data may be from the local system or from a remote system. There are two primary Backup Exec architectures:
1. Standalone Backup Exec configuration
A single Backup Exec server is assigned the standalone Backup Exec server role. Each server runs the Backup Exec software and the services that control backup and restore operations of multiple clients. Each Backup Exec server maintains its own Backup Exec database, media catalogs, and device catalogs.
2. Central Admin Server Option configuration
Large environments may contain multiple Backup Exec servers responsible for backing up many different client systems. Backup Exec servers in large environments can run independently of each other if each server is managed separately. Separate server management may not be an issue if there are only two or three Backup Exec servers, but it can become unwieldy as the environment grows. Backup Exec can centralize the management of multiple Backup Exec servers using an add-on option called the Backup Exec Central Admin Server Option. CASO ensures that everything throughout the network is protected by a single system that can be managed from one console and also balances the workload across all Backup Exec servers in the environment.
In a CASO environment, one Backup Exec server can be configured to be the Central Admin Server, while other Backup Execs become managed Backup Exec servers that are managed by the CAS. The CASO configuration simplifies the management and monitoring of enterprise-level environments.

Features and Capabilities

Backup Exec includes the following features and capabilities:
Backup Exec does not have support for sending data streams from multiple parallel backup jobs to a single tape drive, which Veritas refers to as multiplexing. Their NetBackup product does have this capability.
Multiplexing can reduce backup times when backing up data from non-solid state sources containing millions of small or highly fragmented files, which require very large amounts of head-seeking using traditional mechanical hard drives, and which significantly slow down the backup process.
When only a single job is running, and the source server is constantly seeking at a high rate, the tape drive slows down or may stop, waiting for its write cache to be filled. These delays accessing data can cause the backup availability window to be exceeded, when multiple servers with slow transfer rates are being backed up one after the other to the tape device.
A workaround to this is to install temporary disk storage in the backup server to use as a cache for the backup process. This storage is split into hundreds of small 1-5 gigabyte data blocks. Backups to the data blocks can be done in parallel, and each of the separate disk-based backup jobs are configured to duplicate and append to tape when completed.

Licensing

Backup Exec has the following licensing options: