Assuming you have the SQL Agent installed on your media server then yes Backup Exec will / can backup your live SQL databases.

From a DR point of view you don’t need the Maintenance Plan jobs, however if you have the storage capacity available I personally would recommend keeping them, simply due to the ease in recovering data from them compared to the tape backup.

The way I do it is to backup all of SQL using Backup Exec each night, and also backup the databases using the maintenance plan as a second line of defence. The main benefit of this is that in the event that you need to restore a SQL database due to human error or a software issue (eg the server’s still working) then you can very quickly and easily recover the data far easier than you could otherwise do through Backup Exec, where you might have to change tapes etc. Additionally, if the database has a lot of changes throughout the day you could also do additional transaction log backups through the maintenance plan, which again would allow you to recover back to a specific point in the event that someone makes a mistake. Obviously to save space you could realistically exclude the Maintenance plan backups from your Backup Exec backup, since you wouldn’t need them if you did need to recover from tape in a DR situation.

I see the combination as getting the best of both worlds, the DR capabilities of Backup Exec, with the speed of recovery offered from Maintenance plan backups (which are incidentally virtually useless for DR restores).