I'm also a little concerned about feature pairty between ARS and BESR. Basically, from what I'm reading, it would appear a client side backup partition is required (not optional as it was in ARS) and that the only way to transmit backups was through the off-site functionality, which required an FTP or network share. I have a highly mobile environment, moving between numerous organizations, all of which have different security policies, so the HTTPS tunneled backups that ARS allowed were perfect for us - we are sure that as long as a network connection was available, clients could perform backups, we could recover user hard drives centrally and send them out to traveling users in emergencies, users could recover files from any machine, anywhere, and yes, we enjoy massive traffic and disk savings through all that deduplication.

I'm definitely in the same boat as Greg. Even if it is possible to have clients back up directly to a central location without needing to establish a VPN session, or connect to services over ports that some organizations block, transferring complete hard drives, or even just data subsets without deduplication *before* transmittal is going to be crippling.

Someone feel free to take me down a peg if I am misunderstanding the capabilities and features of BESR!

Thanks,
Andrew

Your concerns are valid. However you are still able to use Recovery Solution for several years before its completely ended. We will continue to provide both technical and development support, for discovered defects, as out lined in the e-mail. During this time frame you can check out the functionality of the Recovery Desktop Edition of Backup Exec or others backup options currently available or released in the near future.

TGiles,

So to be clear - as I read your post, it sounds like the functionality that ARS provides (and for which reason we specifically selected the product) IS NOT available in BESR, and Symantec's recommendation is that we continue using ARS and DO NOT UPGRADE to BESR. Instead, we should wait to see if the ARS functionality finds its way in to BESR, or wait in the hope that another product by Symantec or a 3rd party vendor appears to provide the functionality of ARS?

Thanks,
Andrew

Not exactly. Both ARS & BESR have features that are important to different people. One of ARS's main features is its Redundant File & Block elimination functionality. BESR has the ability to restore backups to dissimiliar hardware making it easier to get systems back online without making sure the new system is identical to the old one.

Depending up which features and options are most important and critical to your needs you can choose to stay with ARS or migrate to BESR.

TGiles,

I do understand that BESR does some things that ARS will not. However, if BESR does not grow to include the ARS functionality, then it's not a valid replacement for ARS. No one has selected ARS because they hoped its replacement product would be able to perform capability X, they selected ARS based on what it currently does. I'm willing to believe that anyone running ARS is going to be less than thrilled with the BESR feature set, regardless of how amazing it is, if it cannot duplicate the features that ARS can perform.

My organization will almost certainly be sticking with ARS, as we need functionality it includes and BESR does not, but it doesn't leave us with a good feeling. We're basically now running a dead product (yes, I know we still have support, but no new feature development, no official support for W7 clients, no support for 64-bit servers, no support for Server 2008/Server 2008 R2 servers, etc, etc) and we're faced with looking for something new.

Andrew

Well officially Recovery Solution 7.0 only supports Desktop operating systems. However I believe that an update is expected for later this year that does add Windows 7 support. I don't know when this release is schedule or the exact features it will include.

...but I'll ask anyway.  So RS is EOL'd.  What if we need more licenses?  I assume we could buy BESR-DE licenses "on paper" and get RS licenses electronically so as to stay in our license compliance.  Reportedly there is "Product X" in the pipeline which merges BESR, RS and possibly another backup app into an all-in-one super Recovery tool (including the RFE/RBE, etc) but that is some time out yet, and I know I won't want to be the one guinea-pigging a 1.0 product in production.  This will almost certainly be a "rip and reload" situation, which is quite a hurdle considering we have dozens of TBs of storage locked up in RS BLOB files.

I have an email in to our Sales guys to get some answers since I don't think this is an answer Tylor can provide from a Support perspective.  I'll post back when I have an answer.

So here's the reply I received:

So I heard back from our Sales Engineer who spoke with Product Management.  His statement was that we (which I take to mean all existing RS for clients customers) will be able to continue purchasing needed RS licenses while development is being done on the next generation backup products.  So to Greg and Andrew I would suggest contacting your Symantec/Altiris sales rep for further clarification.

We will definitely do so - thanks for the update, Kyle.

Andrew

Backup Exec 2010, not to be confused with Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 does has the Deduplication feature and has a backup agent for Desktops and Laptops.  So the technology is allready there, it needs to be integrated into BESR 2010 ASAP. Otherwise I don't see to many RS customers switching over.

However the Restore Anyware option from BESR is great value.

Here a copy and paste from the product info from Backup Exec 2010;

Integrated and adaptable deduplication (using NetBackup PureDisk technology) - Reduce storage costs while optimizing network utilization across physical and virtual environments.

Hello,

How do I get the new license file for BESR? I´ve currently got Altiris recovery solution maintanance support. I have tried calling symantec but they have only redirected me 4 times and don´t seem to get me any new license files for BESR. Must say that symantec support sucks.....