I am glad you mentioned this, and that at the very least, Symantec has provided this service.   I doubt the technical support agents are certified in Microsoft product or Symantec products.  Their support is less than horrible.  And you have to wait for support for 2 to 4 hours on hold.

Either they have tried to cut back on support services to reduce costs, or they are being overloaded with support calls due to poor quality in the product once it was released.  I am thinking this is a little of both. 

Anyhow, I think that I am going to approve the investigation of alternative backup products.

Well I haven't needed to contact Symantec support for BE for quite a while (am I the only one?). I can tell you that the support for Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server is top notch though! It's far more expensive than BE though...

Message Edited by John_B on 05-31-2007 12:20 PM

{Please no personal attacks guys, lets keep it on topic. Thanks}

Message Edited by John_B on 05-31-2007 12:19 PM

"Well I haven't needed to contact Symantec support for BE for quite a while (am I the only one?)."

Nope.  I wasn't an "early adopter" with 11(d), and had a perfectly stable BEX 10 environment running before I went to 11(d) for the encryption capabilities.  I did have some initial issues with compression and encryption, however I got what I thought was wonderful tech support from someone in North America with no accent at all and the solution was provided very quickly.

My system hasn't skipped a beat since we moved to 11(d).  I read the implementation guide, the upgrade install guide, the best practices guide, and who knows what other materials that Symantec provided to me when we upgraded.  I read them all BEFORE we upgraded.  I think that stands to reason why our system has been so stable, personally.

However, I know that there were plenty of bugs in the 11(d) release (anyone who frequents these boards knows something about GRT/Exchange issues) and for that, Symantec, I say shame on you for not testing your product before general release.

I don't use Exchange or the GRT functions, so take that as you will.  I'm overall happy with the new release (not to mention the increased backup speeds we got after the upgrade...our backups went from 550MB/min to 1300MB/min.).

There might seem to be a lot of issues on these boards, but please remember that the 50 or so people complaining about issues represent a very small amount of BEX 11(d) users, which amount to the tens of thousands in North America alone.

Cheers, Jack

The exhortation at the top of the reply form: "When writing your message, remember to keep the language clean."

With that exhortation I will refrain from using the words I'd really like to use to express my frustration with Symantec. I've used BEX for years (since 7.x), sold many customers on it as a consultant, and as director of IT for my company, have implemented and used it for the past 4 years.
Symantec's takeover of Veritas has been a disaster for Backup Exec, IMHO. Back in January, the new licensing model/portal took multiple calls and hours to straighten out. We're talking about a fifteen server farm with Exchange, SQL, Linux, IDR and all the associated agents. My brain must have blocked that experience out because when I got an offer on the new SRO as a part of the BEX package, I thought, "Great, I'll get it. Fits into my overall DR scenario." Well, we're currently waiting after 4 days to hear back from licensing support because "there's a problem".
The product, generally speaking, has been great. The issue is with a product like this, you need quality support. I made the investment in VIP support. I don't feel like I'm getting any return on my investment.

"There might seem to be a lot of issues on these boards, but please remember that the 50 or so people complaining about issues represent a very small amount of BEX 11(d) users, which amount to the tens of thousands in North America alone."

 

Dennis Thornton wrote:

What?  I didn't attack anyone nor did I infer anything (other than the support on BE has degraded since it was bought from Veritas).

Dennis, I sent message in your private message box --> . It Should Be Gold.

Message Edited by John_B on 05-31-2007 07:41 PM