Breece Hill BizGuardian

The ability of the appliance to operate as a standard server in an emergency is easy to prove. We installed and configured Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2005 and Project Server 2007. This is a very typical server configuration and we used several virtual machines. We also added memory to ensure that things would work perfectly. There was no real difference in performance to a standard alone server with comparable processor and memory. Given that most backup operations will be performed at night, this suggests that for organisations looking to deploy an appliance out to remote offices, BizGuardian, as an all-in-one solution, is a good fit.

If there are any criticisms of the BizGuardian it would be that it only comes with EMC Retrospect. This is a Windows Server 2003 appliance so providing the SQL Server, Exchange Server and UIR options as standard would be a more inclusive option.

In addition, given how complex data centre environments are becoming, I would have like to see EMC RepliStor supplied either as standard or an option. It would allow for a more dynamic gathering of changed data from around the network. This, in turn, would lead to a more efficient backup process as the time taken to gather changed files overnight would be further reduced. The only issue would be network bandwidth but in tests we have done previously with RepliStor this is not a big problem for most networks.