Open source networking vendor automates backup
Vyatta uses open source technology in-house in addition to selling open source networking appliances, and Vyatta’s IT administrators at one time wrote custom scripts based on Linux dump. Whenever they added a server to the environment new scripts had to be created.
“The custom scripts were not able to scale and they lacked reliability,” says Ray Zhu, senior IT manager, Vyatta. “We spent a lot of resources maintaining the scripts.”
Vyatta backs up its Web sites, e-mail server, source-code repository, databases, and user files (approximately 2TB); and the amount of company data doubles each year. To stave off the need hardware purchases, Vyatta uses standard compression in its backups.
Zhu installed Amanda Enterprise by himself and he only had a few easy-to-solve support questions for Zmanda’s tech support staff during the installation process. Overall, the interaction with Zmanda proved to be effective and swift.
“Zmanda’s customer support is first rate,” said Zhu. “Their staff has the best expertise, and I always get prompt and to-the-point answers.”
Since installing Amanda Enterprise new servers have been added easily, and the Web-based GUI has made it simple for Zhu to create backups, view schedules, and generate reports.
Using Amanda Enterprise backup-scheduling function, full backups are followed by incrementals during the week. Every system is backed up at least once per week, and recovery is painless.
“I’m able to recover the system using basic Linux tar and gzip commands without Zmanda or Amanda. When it comes to recovering data, you don’t want a lot of dependencies,” said Zhu.
With the combination of Amanda Enterprise Edition and Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, Zhu concluded, “Every morning, I have peace of mind after looking at the Zmanda backup logs.”
Checkout interview with Ray Zhu from Vyatta published in Inc. Magazine.
