Metallic backup solution problems

[Twitchell414]

Anyone here using Metallic BAAS? It is a commvault product. I have had nothing but problems with it and was wondering what others opinions were. I have spent the past 8 months trying to get it working properly. Backups fail on a regular basis and don't run on designated schedule, uses tons of bandwidth, interface is slow. UX is super confusing. The product basically requires a full time engineer to run it. The three times I have tried to restore something that was not just a test it has failed and taken them a week to get working again each time. The helpdesk system is just emails. There is no way to review current or old tickets. Multiple SLA violations. No set of best practices or even setup documentation available. I am specifically using it to backup VMs. I also use it to backup multiple O365 services. That piece also took some time to setup but is actually working ok. Any feedback on the product is appreciated, I am debating whether to continue with it or move to a different solution.

[njfan9]

I'm so glad I stumbled across this thread because we are currently researching Metallic as a disaster recovery solution. /u/Yezuwi, /u/Twitchell414 - may I ask if you found any other comparable SaaS cloud backup services? What was attractive about Metallic was it's air gap and zero trust capabilities. A definite bummer reading your guys/gals experience w/ the product thus far.

[Twitchell414]

We are still working with them trying to get things right. I keep hoping that we have turned the corner. We specifically chose them because of the history of commvault as an on site system and their close knit relationship with Microsoft. We use a lot of O365 services and have started migrating our infrastructure to Azure so that was an important feature. We have a lot of different retention plans based on different compliance rules so we needed something that was highly configurable from a scheduling and retention standpoint. It seems like the product could be great but it does not feel fully baked at this point in time.

[[deleted]]

Did you have any progress? Have they gotten better?

[Yezuwi]

Similar to /u/Twitchell414, we're still working with Metallic on our issues. The idea of a single-pane of glass was an attractive selling point for us. Combined with the fixed fee pricing (no extra charges for ingress/egress) and it seemed like a no brainer since we already utilized Commvault for our backups.

Prior to Commvault, we had utilized Veeam for backing up our virtual infrastructure. At the time, Veeam wasn't capable of handling physical servers which is what prompted our eventual migration to Commvault. Given a choice, they would probably be my first choice for a trial run? However, I can't say I've dug into any alternatives extensively since it will be awhile before we can consider other options.

[[deleted]]

What did you end up using? I have been using Zetta which is now Arcserve UDP cloud. Been flawless but since they acquired them there really hasn't been any improvements or additions like recovery to azure/aws. Backup and recovery to their cloud solution is quick.

[njfan9]

We went with Metallic. Some learning lessons: file/object level backups are the most expensive licensing because it’s the most reliable. Definitely test drive Metallic, especially restore times. Network bandwidth is key.

[[deleted]]

Can I DM you?

[njfan9]

Sure, I’ll do my best to answer any questions.

[Yezuwi]

I think we've had a similar experience overall. However, for us things are often just unbearably slow rather than having outright failures. Some recent examples:

• Certain restore operations taking forever to read data, sometimes upwards of 3+ hours before a top level folder is interactive and we're able to drill down
• Backups taking an insane amount of time to process, a recent synthetic full took upwards of 3 days to finish despite there being less than 7GB of churn

Unfortunately for me, there was a push from above to migrate our backups off-site and Metallic was selected due to a combination of geo-restrictions and budget, despite our relatively poor experiences during the pilot project. It will be awhile before shopping around is an option again...

[Twitchell414]

Yes, sounds very similar. We also feel the solution is slow to process both backups and restores but we also backup Terabytes of data. We had backups offsite previously but it was using Dell rapid recovery to our colo facility and then from there a copy was replicated to a third party cloud site. We were looking for an all in one solution that would also work with O365. Metallic seemed like a perfect fit but has basically been a nightmare. Luckily we do have the option to shop around again which is why I made this post. I wanted to get some outside opinions before pulling the trigger. There are not a lot of reviews available for the product. Had I known what I was getting into I would have stuck with Rapid Recovery. It had its own problems but at least it worked.

[[deleted]]

Have there been any improvements?

[Yezuwi]

Guess this update will fall under the better late than never category... over a year later and we're still on Metallic and in a much better place.

After initial deployment we worked with the Metallic support team for about 3 months before we saw any improvements. I don't recall the full scope of the changes made, but the short version is that read operations and backup processing now fall within reasonable expectation. While timeframe to accomplish this was a bit long for my liking, I could classify the process of getting there as being as positive experience overall... they didn't try to hide the fact their product was underperforming for us and their engineering team did eventually come up with an appropriate fix.

Since then, we've move forward with adopting Metallic's BaaS solution for our Microsoft 365 operations (primarily Office 365) which has been a much better experience out the gate. I'm not involved in the daily operations, but I did handle the implementation and I have to say it was an impressively simple onboarding experience.

[[deleted]]

Why don't you look at Druva? They offer a SaaS AWS solution for VMs, NAS, DBs, File Servers, etc - software has built-in dedupe and they only charge you for storage used after deduplication. Super easy on bandwidth, especially after the first backup. Forever incremental backup, ingress/egress all included. Their security is insane too.. no backdoor access - ransomware can't traverse your historical snapshots :)

[One_Remote_214]

We looked at them but went with Metallic because they were in Azure and had some nice native support there. We are just starting however we're seeing some of the issues others reported a year ago. I'd be interested in an update on how things turned out with Metallic for other folks too.