- What is your RPO? (recovery point objective)
- What is your RTO? (recovery time objective)
- What type of backup are you requiring, Full, Weekly, Incremental, Off-site?
- What is your backup time window? (Can you fit your backups to it?)
- How many servers do you want to backup - How much data? (Buy a single backup
server or a server with a media server) - Will they be supported by the backup software? (OS and application)
- What is the average daily data change? (Full every day or incremental)
- What is your growth prediction?
- Do you have more than one site to backup?
- Are you buying a new backup server or using an old one? (Check hardware
and OS compatibility lists) - Are you migrating from an old backup program to a new one? (Keep the old
one alive? for how long?) - Backup to tape or disk? (simple disk or a Deduplication disk?)
- Is the data on NAS devices or servers? (What vendor? - check support matrix, needs
NDMP license) - How many virtual machines are you planning to backup? (Network backup or SAN backup)
- Are your virtual machines VSS aware?
- Will your backup program be able to truncate the virtual machine log? (SQL, SharePoint, Exchange)
- Does your virtual machines contain physical RDM (VMware) or pass through
disks (Hyper-V)? (You will need an agent) - Do you have a virtual cluster? (Virtual center - VMware, CSV - Hyper-V)
- Some virtual machines are actually an appliance - Their vendor should supply a
way to back them up. - Have you got a DR site? (Backup the DR servers, allow quick recovery on the DR site,
additional hardware) - What kind of support are you looking for? (24x7, 9-17 etc.)
- What is your budget?
Don't forget the most important rule of backups: Restore!
The following links will provide you with a starting point and will show you the trends of the
enterprise backup software community:
List of backup software (Wikipedia)
Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances (June 2015)
Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances (September 2015)
