Advanced Disk Based Option of Symantec BackupExec - a waste

You may have read some marketing material about the Advanced Disk Based Option (ADBO) for BackupExec that allows you to take a snapshot of a LUN and then transfer the LUN to your backup server in order for the backup to take place directly to your backup server. This is a great idea and would dramatically reduce backup times for key applications since snapshots of a LUN are done in a few seconds. Unfortunately, the implementation of this product is not practical.

The major gripe I have is the fact that in order for this to work, all of your OS's that you are snapshotting from must be the same exact version as your backup server. If you are running a data center, you know that getting every server to the exact same version is next to impossible. Apparently the reasoning behind this is the fact that it relies on VSS (volume shadow copy) as the engine to perform the actual snapshot of the data and NOT the SAN provider itself. Since each VSS engine is different in various OS's (Windows 2003 vs 2003 64 bit vs 2003 R2 vs etc. etc. etc.) then it will not work.

I can't stress how ridiculous this is and how much of a hindrance to implementation this must be for folks. Dell has even marketed this integration in their marketing guides for Equallogic and how there is a partner relationship between Symantec and Dell. Do not let these guides fool you because this one is a show stopper that is hard to overcome.

This is true not only with version 12.5 of BackupExec but also the latest 2010 version as well.