OK, I am little confused on the drives. Correct me if I am wrong. But, the three hot swappable drives are obviously for your server itself. And, they are $90 each. That is rather inexpensive even for the price of drives now.
The removable drives are for backups, correct? How much are they? Let's just say they are a total of $500. That would mean that you are spending $1500 on Symantec? Ouch. I was playing around with Symantec's latest backup software. It just seemed too complicated for me.
I would consider three other programs. BackupAssist is very good backup software for only $249. They do get you a little if you add on SQL module and Exchange. But, it is very easy to configure, works very well. I have used it for over six years.
The other would be Acronis. For a long time, it was rock solid and very easy set up. Now it is rock solid and very difficult setup. But, it is still the best imaging software. It runs around $700 for server.
The other thing to consider is that even though Microsoft makes very, very slow strides toward making good backup software, although a lot of IT people were fine wit ntBackup (which is gone on 2008). But, there imaging backup software is actually rather good and, since it is native to the server, it does a bare metal restore very well. I definitely use it along with Backup Assist.
I still am very, very, wary of Symantec anything. I just think they are the only company that makes Microsoft look good.
