The Great Yellow Peril

 Vendors  2 Responses »
Apr 182011
 

[W:Symantec] is a company with which I have a love-hate relationship, erring strongly on the side of hate nowadays. I suppose I should pick my words carefully or something as they are a big partner of Dell but honestly weeks like last week really make it quite hard. Yes, I know, the software mainly works pretty well and is the right price, but what about when it doesn’t work?

Some of Symantec’s products are pretty good. BackupExec is OK for a backup product, even though everybody hates backup, the old VVR product was pretty good (shame they canned it), I quite like Norton as a home security product despite the price, and [W:Enterprise Vault] is actually quite clever some of the time. Some of their products filled me with hope then cruelly dashed it. [W:Altiris] and [W:NetBackup] are the culprits, and the reference call for [W:PureDisk] was so dismal that I never deployed it even though it was given to us free. I think the major deployment platform for PD is PowerPoint.

Part of this is my fault (and others like me) for allowing ourselves to be sold promised panaceas to what are often organisational problems. That never works. Some of it is their presales team, who never admit that you need a Chinese army to make most of their “enterprise” products work.

But far and away the biggest factor in making people hate Symantec is the support. It is utterly dire. Not only is it dire, but they are actively making it worse.

Example: Five years  ago when I used BackupExec to protect a half dozen key servers in a branch office, if you had a problem you could ping up a text chat window and a friendly dude from India would fix your pain there and then. If it got too fiddly he’d pick up the phone. First click to final fix was generally of the order of an hour or so. But now it’s different. For two weeks I’ve been onsite while a client waits for resolutions to issues with BackupExec. Every call seems to involve uploading some more logs and then going away for another couple of days. One guy has been almost full-time on hold or chasing Symantec support calls for two weeks.

This is “basic” support. I know from what we were told at SunGard that a Sev 1 from a basic support account goes in the queue behind Sev 1 and Sev 2 from Business Critical. The cost of Business Critical support is extortionate, so much so that a substantial market exists in third party support for Symantec products.

My beef is not the speed so much as the fact that every communication drops into a black hole. It’s not just me saying this, it’s a major reason why NetBackup is under review at SunGard with a view to replacing with [W:EMC Networker] – EMC support is good, Symantec support is unpleasant. Even when you’ve paid hundreds of thousands for the product, support still stinks. And if it turns to ratshit you’re on your own – expect them to try to close it down to statements of work as soon as possible, and “doing what you bought the product to do and what it was sold to achieve” does not figure anywhere on there.

Sorry guys, you are way of the pace here. There are some superbly helpful and knowledgeable people in Symantec, and a huge machinery designed to impress you with them pre-sales – occasionally also on escalation post-sales. The gulf between the pre sales and post sales experience, though, is far and away the biggest of any company I know. I used to like you, I used to advocate for you, now I find it really hard to stand up for you in the face of legitimate criticism which you show no signs of addressing. Even bloody [W:CA ARCserve] is making friends these days, Symantec is making mainly enemies because after you’ve handed over your money they give absolutely the strongest impression that they wish you’d go away and leave them alone.

On Friday I asked a friend at Symantec for some advice; on the way in this morning a colleague of his called me, in ten minutes he imparted more information and genuine help than the client had got in the past two weeks of the support mill. The difference? The helpful guys are pre-sales. One was formerly on mission critical support. Big shout to Mark Small, top man, and powerfully persuasive pre-sales. What a shame the post-sales support lets him down.

Buck up, lads.

Backup means vendor lock-in. We hate that.

 Vendors, Virtualisation  1 Response »
Nov 302010
 

As I said before: backup sucks, move on. Here’s why I think the manufacturers of backup software are not keen to fix this.

We are looking at a rip and replace of our backup software. The new vendor is prepared to buy out the existing licenses giving us a cost-neutral solution; they will make their money form the professional services and the support contract that wraps around it. Fair enough.

We’re lucky: most of our data is not covered by [W:Sarbanes-Oxley] or any other form of compliance or regulatory regime. For most people the data that gets backed up most carefully is going to be the data covered by compliance. Which means you have a bunch of data in a proprietary format, in order to restore which you need to retain copies of the then-current software.

That’s not exactly optimal in the tape world, and you are horribly exposed if you have to recover the data – if you stop paying maintenance because you changed vendors then typically the software companies will want to charge you all the back maintenance right back to when you stopped paying before they will give you any support at all should you need it, so that’s a substantial exposure. It could even be more than the value of the software, with renewals running typically at 20% of box price at the moment.

But that’s manageable and it might never happen. What about if you backup to disk?

Let’s say you use a DataDomain appliance as your backup target (or a VTL or any other reasonably sophisticated backup target). In general these use block level deduplication or some other single-instancing methodology to keep down the amount of storage you use. Guess what: the new backups could be different bitwise even for the same data.

You could end up doubling your storage usage.

Or you have to stream off to tape, which brings the whole world of retensioning, media lifecycle and tape handling.

What does this add up to? Vendor lock-in.

We hate vendor lock-in

We. Hate. Vendor. Lock-in.

Like almost nothing else, we hate vendor lock-in. Why? Because it magnifies the consequences of a mistake. If I buy BackupWorker today but next year find that they’re not supporting some new platform or VMware version or something, I have massive pain to go through if I want to switch to NetVault.

And actually this is all caused by something that we should not be doing in the first place: writing proprietary stream data instead of image data. A VMDK file should be backed up as a VMDK file. There should be no restore.

Symantec, the Great Yellow Peril, actually have a product that more or less does this: BackupExec System Recovery. It’s quite clever and it will even do a fair job of offline P-V conversion for weirdly configured systems. It writes a mountable, bootable image. Symantec market this in the SME space and it would be silly money to deploy widescale, but it shows it can be done. Veeam do it too. There is no excuse any more for pretending that disk targets are all virtual tape, virtual tape sucks as much as physical tape. Block level is the way to go. “Virtual tape sucks too, move on!” as those nice people at [W:EMC Data Domain] put it.

Why will vendors not give us what we want? There has to be a suspicion that at least some of it is down to vendor lock-in.

If all backup software provided nothing other than a means for turning VMs and physical machines to a consistent disk image, be it [W:VHD (file format)] or [W:VMDK], or something else, then switching would be easy. They would have to retain our business with things like excellent support and rapid adoption of new platforms, software and versions. They’d have to become as agile as we want to be, or lose our business.

I can see why they might prefer to keep us locked in.

Addendum: hat-tip @EwanToo who rightly points out that some file container is a good idea for error detection, and proposes the POSIX TAR standard. This does make sense especially for archival but is consistent with the idea of retaining a vendor-neutral file format. For recovery you really would rather not have to untar anything, but it’s not so hard.