Tag Archives: retrospect

Retrospect Announces Retrospect Backup 18.5

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Retrospect recently announced an update to its Backup (18.5) product. I had the opportunity to speak to JG Heithcock (GM, Retrospect) about the announcement and thought I’d briefly share some thoughts here.

 

What’s New?

Anomaly Detection

You can now detect anomalies in systems based on customisable filters and thresholds tailored to individual environments. It still relies on someone doing something about it, but it’s definitely a positive step forward. You can also configure the anomaly detection to work with Retrospect’s scripting / orchestration engine, kicking off various processes when something has gone wrong.

Retrospect Management Console Integration

This capability has been integrated wth the Management Console, and you can now view anomalies across a business or partner’s entire client base in a single pane of glass.

[image courtesy of Retrospect]

Improved Microsoft Azure Blob Integration

You can now set individual immutable retention policies for different backup sets within the same Azure Storage Container. This capability was already available with Retrospect’s AWS S3 integration.

Streamlined Immutable Backup User Experience

Automatically create cloud buckets with immutable backups supported by default. There’s also support for StorCentric’s Unity S3 capability out of the box.

LTO-9 Support

Is tape dead? Maybe. But there are still people using it, and this release includes support for LTO-9, with capacities up to 18TB (45TB compressed).

 

Thoughts

Retrospect Backup 18.5 is a free upgrade to Retrospect Backup 18. While it doesn’t set the world on fire in terms of a broad range of features, there’s some stuff in here that should get existing users excited, and give those considering the product a little more to mull over. Retrospect has been chipping away slowly but surely over the years, and I think it provides the traditional SME market with something that’s been difficult to get until recently: a solid data protection solution, with modern capabilities such as ransomware detection and object storage support, for a price that won’t send customers in that segment packing. I think that’s pretty good, and I look forward to see how things progress over the next 6 – 12 months.

Random Short Take #56

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Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.

  • Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
  • 22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
  • It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
  • Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
  • The site name in VMware Cloud Director can look a bit ugly. Steve O gives you the skinny on how to change it.
  • Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
  • Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
  • I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.

*Bonus Round*

I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.

Retrospect Announces Retrospect Backup 18 and Retrospect Virtual 2021

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Retrospect recently announced new versions of its Backup (18) and Virtual (2021) products. I had the opportunity to speak to JG Heithcock (GM, Retrospect) about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What’s New?

New Management Console & Workflow 

  • Simplified workflows
  • Comprehensive reporting through an updated management console

The Retrospect Management Console now supports geo tracking with a worldwide map of all users, Retrospect Backup servers, and remote clients, down to the city.

[image courtesy of Retrospect]

Cloud Native

  • Deploy directly in the cloud
  • Protect application data

Note that cloud native means that you can deploy agents on cloud-based hypervisor workloads and protect them. It doesn’t mean support for things like Kubernetes.

Anti-Ransomware Protection

Enables users to set immutable retention periods and policies within Amazon S3, Wasabi and Backblaze B2 and supports bucket-level object lock in Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure.

Pricing

There’s a variety of pricing options available. When you buy a perpetual license, you have access to any new minor or major version upgrades for 12 months. With the monthly subscription model you have access to the latest version of the product for as long as you keep the subscription active.

[image courtesy of Retrospect]

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

I’ve mentioned in my previous coverage of Retrospect that I’m fan of the product, if only for the fact that the consumer and SME space is screaming out for simple to use data protection solutions. Any solution that can help users develop some kind of immunity to ransomware has to be a good thing, and it’s nice to see Retrospect getting there in terms of cloud support. This isn’t as fully featured a product as some of the enterprise solutions out there, but for the price it doesn’t need to be.

Ultimately, the success of software like this is a balance between usability, cost, and reliability. The Retrospect folks seem cognisant of this, and have gone some way to fill the gaps where they could, and are working on others. I’ll be taking this version for a spin in the lab in the very near future, and hope to report back with how it all went.

Random Short Take #44

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Welcome to Random Short Take #44. A few players have worn 44 in the NBA, including Danny Ainge and Pistol Pete, but my favourite from this list is Keith Van Horn.  A nice shooting touch and strong long sock game. Let’s get random.

  • ATMs are just computers built to give you money. And it’s scary to think of the platforms that are used to deliver that functionality. El Reg pointed out a recent problem with one spotted in the wild in Ngunnawal.
  • Speaking of computing at the edge, I found this piece from Keith interesting. As much as things change they stay the same. I think he’s spot on when he says “[m]anufacturers and technology companies must come together with modular solutions that enable software upgrades for these assets’ lives”. We need to be demanding more from the industry when it comes to some of this stuff.
  • Heard about Project Monterey at VMworld and wanted to know more? Pensando has you covered.
  • I enjoyed this article from Preston about the difference between bunkers and vaults – worth checking out even if you’re not a Dell EMC customer.
  • Cloud – it can be tough to know which way to go. And a whole bunch of people have an interest in you using their particular solution. This article from Chris Evans was particularly insightful.
  • DH2i has launched DxOdyssey for IoT – you can read more about that here.
  • Speaking of news, Retrospect recently announced Backup 17.5 too. There are some cloud improvements, and support for macOS Big Sur beta.
  • It’s the 30th anniversary of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby“, and like me you were probably looking for a comprehensive retrospective on Vanilla Ice’s career. Look no further than this article over at The Ringer.

Random Short Take #38

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Welcome to Random Short Take #38. Not a huge amount of players have worn 38 in the NBA, and I’m not going to pretend I was ever a Kwame Brown fan. Although it did seem like he had a tough time of it. Anyway let’s get random.

  • Ransomware is the new hotness. Or, rather, protecting storage systems from ransomware is the new hotness. My man Chin-Fah had a writeup on that here. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when you’ll run into a problem. It’s been interesting to see the various approaches being taken by the storage vendors and the data protection companies.
  • Applications for the vExpert program intake for the second half of 2020 are open, but closing soon. It’s a fantastic program to be a part of, so if you think you’ve got the goods, you can apply here. I also recommend this article from Christopher on his experiences.
  • This was a great article from Alastair on some of the differences between networking with AWS and VMC on AWS. As someone who works for a VMware Cloud Provider, I can confirm that NSX (T or V, I don’t care) has a whole slew of capabilities and whole slew of integration challenges.
  • Are you Zoomed out? I am. Even when you think the problem can’t be the network, it might just be the network (I hope my friends in networking appreciate that it’s not always the storage). John Nicholson posted a typically comprehensive overview of how your bandwidth might be one of the things keeping you from demonstrating excellent radio voice on those seemingly endless meetings you’re doing at the moment. It could also be that you’re using crap audio devices too, but I think John’s going to cover that in the future.
  • Scale Computing has a good story to tell about what it’s been doing with a large school district in the U.S. Read more about that here.
  • This is one of those promotions aimed at my friends in Northern America more than folks based where I am, but I’m always happy to talk about deals on data protection. StorCentric has launched its “Retrospect Dads & Grads Promotion” offering a free 90-Day subscription license for every Retrospect Backup product. You can read more about that here.
  • Pure//Accelerate Online was this week, and Max did a nice write-up on Pure Storage File Services over at Gestalt IT.
  • Rancher Labs recently announced the general availability of Longhorn (a cloud-native container storage solution). I’m looking forward to digging in to this a bit more over the next little while.

 

 

Random Short Take #35

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Welcome to Random Short Take #35. Some really good players have worn 35 in the NBA, including The Big Dog Antoine Carr, and Reggie Lewis. This one, though, goes out to one of my favourite players from the modern era, Kevin Durant. If it feels like it’s only been a week since the last post, that’s because it has. I bet you wish that I was producing some content that’s more useful than a bunch of links. So do I.

  • I don’t often get excited about funding rounds, but I have a friend who works there, so here’s an article covering the latest round (C) of funding for VAST Data.
  • Datadobi continue to share good news in these challenging times, and has published a success story based on some work it’s done with Payspan.
  • Speaking of challenging times, the nice folks a Retrospect are offering a free 90-day license subscription for Retrospect Backup. You don’t need a credit card to sign up, and “[a]ll backups can be restored, even if the subscription is cancelled”.
  • I loved this post from Russ discussing a recent article on Facebook and learning from network failures at scale. I’m in love with the idea that you can’t automate your way out of misconfiguration. We’ve been talking a lot about this in my day job lately. Automation can be a really exciting concept, but it’s not magic. And as scale increase, so too does the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. It all seems like a straightforward concept, but you’d be surprised how many people are surprised by these ideas.
  • Software continues to dominate the headlines, but hardware still has a role to play in the world. Alastair talks more about that idea here.
  • Paul Stringfellow recently jumped on the Storage Unpacked podcast to talk storage myths versus reality. Worth listening to.
  • It’s not all good news though. Sometimes people make mistakes, and pull out the wrong cables. This is a story I’ll be sharing with my team about resiliency.
  • SMR drives and consumer NAS devices aren’t necessarily the best combo. So this isn’t the best news either. I’m patiently waiting for consumer Flash drive prices to come down. It’s going to take a while though.

 

Retrospect Announces Backup 17 And Virtual 2020

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Retrospect recently announced new versions of its Backup (17) and Virtual (2020) products. I had the opportunity to speak to JG Heithcock (GM, Retrospect) about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What’s New?

Retrospect Backup 17 has the following new features:

  • Automatic Onboarding: Simplified and automated deployment and discovery;
  • Nexsan E-Series / Unity Certification;
  • 10x Faster ProactiveAI; and
  • Restore Preflight for restores from cold storage.

Retrospect Virtual 2020 has the following enhancements:

  • Automatic Onboarding: Physical and Virtual monitoring from a single website;
  • 50% Faster;
  • Wasabi Cloud Support;
  • Backblaze B2 Cloud Support; and
  • Flexible licensing between VMware and Hyper-V.

Automatic Onboarding?

So what exactly is automatic onboarding? You can onboard new servers and endpoints for faster deployment and automatic discovery.

  • Share one link with your team. No agent password required.
  • Retrospect Backup finds and protects new clients with ProactiveAI.
  • Add servers, desktops, and laptops to Retrospect Backup.
  • Single pane of glass for entire backup infrastructure with Retrospect Management Console.
  • Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You can also onboard a new Retrospect Backup server for faster, simplified deployment.

  • Protect group or site.
  • Customised installer with license built-in.
  • Seamless Management Console integration.
  • Available for Windows and Mac.

Onboard new Retrospect Virtual server for complete physical and virtual monitoring.

  • Customised installer
  • Seamless Management Console integration.
  • Monitor Physical + Virtual

Pricing

There’s a variety of pricing available. When you buy a perpetual license, you have access to any new minor or major version upgrades for 12 months. With the monthly subscription model you have access to the latest version of the product for as long as you keep the subscription active.

[image courtesy of Retrospect]

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

Retrospect was acquired by StorCentric in June 2019 after bouncing around a few different owners over the years. It’s been around for a long time, and has a rich history of delivering data protection solutions for small business and “prosumer” markets. I have reasonably fond memories of Retrospect from the time when it was shipped with Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives. Platform support is robust, with protection options available across Windows, macOS and some Linux, and the pricing is competitive. Retrospect is also benefitting from joining the StorCentric family, and I’m looking forward to hearing about more product integrations as time goes on.

Why would I cover a data protection product that isn’t squarely targeted at the enterprise or cloud market? Because I’m interested in data protection solutions across all areas of IT. I think the small business and home market is particularly under-represented when it comes to easy to deploy and run solutions. There is a growing market for cloud-based solutions, but simple local protection options still seem to be pretty rare. The number of people I talk to who are just manually copying data from one spot to another is pretty crazy. Why is it so hard to get good backup and recovery happening on endpoints? It shouldn’t be. You could argue that, with the advent of SaaS services and cloud-based storage solutions, the requirement to protect endpoints the way we used to has changed. But local protection options still makes it a whole lot quicker and easier to recover.

If you’re in the market for a solution that is relatively simple to operate, has solid support for endpoint operating systems and workloads, and is competitively priced, then I think Retrospect is worth evaluating. You can read the announcement here.

Random Short Take #23

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Want some news? In a shorter format? And a little bit random? This listicle might be for you.

  • Remember Retrospect? They were acquired by StorCentric recently. I hadn’t thought about them in some time, but they’re still around, and celebrating their 30th anniversary. Read a little more about the history of the brand here.
  • Sometimes size does matter. This article around deduplication and block / segment size from Preston was particularly enlightening.
  • This article from Russ had some great insights into why it’s not wise to entirely rule out doing things the way service providers do just because you’re working in enterprise. I’ve had experience in both SPs and enterprise and I agree that there are things that can be learnt on both sides.
  • This is a great article from Chris Evans about the difficulties associated with managing legacy backup infrastructure.
  • The Pure Storage VM Analytics Collector is now available as an OVA.
  • If you’re thinking of updating your Mac’s operating environment, this is a fairly comprehensive review of what macOS Catalina has to offer, along with some caveats.
  • Anthony has been doing a bunch of cool stuff with Terraform recently, including using variable maps to deploy vSphere VMs. You can read more about that here.
  • Speaking of people who work at Veeam, Hal has put together a great article on orchestrating Veeam recovery activities to Azure.
  • Finally, the Brisbane VMUG meeting originally planned for Tuesday 8th has been moved to the 15th. Details here.