Backup Central

I'm looking for comparisons of networker 7.x and netbackup 5.x

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Our organization is evaluating software needs and costs. Currently
we're a veritas shop. =20

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If anyone wants to chime in with personal experiences, we'd be looking
for the following features first and foremost:

SAN media Servers

Shared tape drives

Offsite copies (vault)

NDMP backups

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I know both products will do all the above, but I'm curious how smoothly
they work.

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Legato's pricing is better than netbackup, but I'm comfortable with
netbackup. Any links or personal experiences would be helpful.

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Thanks

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3/7/2005 10:20 AM

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Rob> I'm looking for comparisons of networker 7.x and netbackup 5.x

I've only used NetBackup 4.5, and I can't say I liked it very much.

Rob> Our organization is evaluating software needs and costs. Currently
Rob> we're a veritas shop.

If you're already running NetBackup and are happy with it, then I'd
stay with it. We consolidated from a mix of NetBackup and Networker
at my last job down to a single NetBackup instance. I wasn't happy,
but I'm a Networker user from the early 4.x days.

Rob> If anyone wants to chime in with personal experiences, we'd be looking
Rob> for the following features first and foremost:

Rob> Offsite copies (vault)

I found Vault to be limited in how well it worked. Or more
accurately, it was a pain to run and wasn't easily scriptable to
generate useful reports.

Rob> NDMP backups

I don't think NetBackup can save NDMP images to a staging device, and
then stream to tape later. You still need to dedicate a tape drive
for each NMDP stream you want to backup in parallel. Not ideal in my
book. I know Networker 7.2 should have worked around this, but I'm
not installing it until 7.2.1 is out the door.

Rob> I know both products will do all the above, but I'm curious how
Rob> smoothly they work.

The big issue is how are you going to restore older backups? You'll
have to keep around the server hardware/index disk space for doing
NetBackup restores if you switch to Networker. It's a pain,
especially if you have long retention time requirements. And as you
use it less and less, it's gets harder to make sure you know how to
work with it.

Me, I'm happy with Networker and what it does, I never got my mind
wrapped around NetBackup enough to feel comfortable with it and how it
worked. NetBackup doesn't have the nice 'nsrwatch' command line tool,
where you can *see* what's going on with your backups in real time.
The best feature is the 'throughput' estimate you see per-tape drive.
I find this invaluable for monitoring the system, since you can get a
feel for how well it's going.

With NetBackup, it's not nearly as nice or as easy to monitor how fast
data is acutally being written to a device, and the reports it
generates when backups are done (jobs) are horrendous.

Just my two cents.

John
John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
john.stoffel < at > taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087

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SAN media Servers

With NetWorker you can share tapes between Storage Nodes (Media Servers).
you can't with NB. This will reduce the number of tapes you use.
Also, NW does not delete data from the media database until the tape is
actually relabelled, unlike NB which deletes it when it is recyclable.

Shared tape drives

Pretty much the same, except NW can do Dynamin Drive Sharing (SSO) with
NDMP servers

Offsite copies (vault)

Cloning, which also de-multiplexes the data.

NDMP backups

Legato, via acquisition, invented NDMP. it is very fast. What more do you
want?


I know both products will do all the above, but I'm curious how smoothly
they work.



Legato's pricing is better than netbackup, but I'm comfortable with
netbackup. Any links or personal experiences would be helpful.

Look at things like management. Mostly the GUI in NB is better, but NW now
comes with NetWorker Management Consolke for free. This is the equivalent to
GDM. It's a much better GUI and comes with reporting.

Also, if you have file systems with lots of small files, NB has a large
overhead, so NW is much quicker on backing thos eup (Although still not
lightning fast). I'd suggest looking at SnapShot technologies for those.


Thanks





Confidentiality Notice: The information contained in this e-mail from Rob
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sender and permanently delete the e-mail and any attachments immediately.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation. 3/7/2005 10:20 AM

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Siobhan Ellis
Senior Technology Consultant
Enstor
Level 10, 118 Alfed St
Milsons Point
NSW 2061
Australia

Mobile: +61 424 750 544
Phone: +61 2 9900 2100
Fax: +61 2 9900 2199
e-mail: siobhan.ellis < at > enstor.com.au

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Siobhan Ellis wrote:
Legato, via acquisition, invented NDMP. it is very fast.

NDMP was in use long before Legato purchased PDC, the developer
of Budtool and along with Netapp, the co-inventor of NDMP. In fact
Legato was late to the NDMP party; even Netbackup supported NDMP
before Networker.

Although Budtool had its problems, it had an awesome database for
its time - 256 bytes per record and it was ASCII, so crafting
scripts to customize reports, end-user friendly front-ends, etc,
as as simple as reading the API. And supported NDMP in 1996.

- michael

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