Chris Miller Blog

RocketScientist's Miscellaneous Ramblings

Hyperbac anyone?

by Chris Miller

Does anyone have anything bad to say about Hyperbac?

I've searched google, blown through every article there, blog entries, and everything.  I can't find a single bad thing about the product.

Hell, Lance likes it.  And I haven't ever seen Lance like any technology more advanced than bacon.

"Wheels suck.  They square off, don't roll uphill on their own!  I saw one roll backwards down a hill and over some guy's toe once.  This is crap!"

Seriously.

"Fire's kinda OK, but I watched some guy get burned real bad once.  I think I'll stay away from that."

And then Hyperbac:

"I've been testing that for over a year now and haven't found any problems."

Yeah.  So either it (1) is completely suck free, or (2) they slipped Lance some really neat pills.

Thoughts?


Legacy Comments
Brent Ozar
2008-11-26		 re: Hyperbac anyone?
Disclaimer: I work for a competitor, Quest Software, makers of LiteSpeed. On the other hand, what I'm about to say is from my personal mouth, not Quest's.

I haven't heard anything negative said about the feature they've implemented, compression on disk. They did a solid job on that feature.

But if you compare their feature set to the other enterprise-class SQL Server backup packages on the market (LiteSpeed, SQLsafe, etc) and go checkbox through the list of features, that's where the difference is. No enterprise console, no log shipping wizards, no GUI for object-level restore (you have to use SSIS or linked servers?!?), etc.

Their feature works great, but I'd probably be concerned about having only that one feature and going up against SQL Server 2008 Enterprise's built-in compressed backups. Our customers have said they're not as concerned about 2008's compression because we do so much other stuff. I'm not sure Hyperbac can make that statement.
Chris Miller
2008-11-26		 re: Hyperbac anyone?
You're absolutely right, Hyperbac has far fewer enterprise-class features. And they have a non-enterprise-class price tag, more than making up for the lack of enterprise class features in my environment. If really all the competitors are fronting is an enterprise UI, I can probably contract to have one built cheaper than the cost difference on the software license for 20 servers.

One *extremely* compelling feature is the free restore-only license. That's the biggest missing feature in all of the competing products in the marketplace. "Well, why is that a big deal?" OK, so I have a piece of software I manage that's from an ISV. We're having a problem with it and the ISV says "Well, I either need production access to your database or send me a copy of the last backup." OK, so it takes a week to get Ops to get around to making me a VPN connection, and I'm not all that hot on the idea anyway. But I can't send them a copy of my backup I made last night, because it's in an incompatible binary format. Sure, they can install a demo from a website and (1) end up with endless annoying sales calls (seriously, y'all need to lighten up a bit), and (2) have it expire like 2 days before the next problem where they need a backup. Enter the FREE RESTORE LICENSE. And the ability to just open the file with any zip extraction program if they don't want to install the FREE RESTORE LICENSE.

Did I mention the FREE RESTORE LICENSE yet? Just thought I'd emphasize that. Basically any of our ISV's can download, for FREE from Hyperbac, a LICENSEd copy of the software that can only RESTORE databases. That'd be awesome for my development environment where I need to do restores occasionally but don't really care to do exhaustive backups, so I can FREEly RESTORE copies of my database.

I'm not that worried about the backup compression features in SQL Server 2008, because Microsoft decided not to cut all the SQL Server utilities ISV's off from their trough by making that an enterprise only feature. Although it was amusing watching the GM's a the GM's Unplugged feature at PASS squirming when like 3 different people asked them why that was in Enterprise, because they need the feature and think it should be in Standard. This is a somewhat family blog, so I won't say exactly what I think of that decision. I almost went off on the GM panel though.

Of course, the utilities ISVs are probably having really bad indigestion right now anyway. Let's see, the two major products are compressed backup and server monitoring, and compressed backup is built in and server monitoring is a *lot* easier with the Central Management Server stuff built into SQL Server 2008.

I've still got servers running on SQL Server 2000. How long do you think it'll take me to get all my servers to 2008? Give you a hint, I've got 0 production 2008 servers, and plans to have 1 next year.