On Fri, 27 Jan 1995 10:00:07 -0800 Chris Krusch said:
>At 06:55 PM 1/26/95 CST, Keith A. Crabb wrote:
>>Must be getting competitive in the network backup market, I've gotten
>>two cold calls and our DEC salesrep was just around pushing DEC's
>>NetWorker Save and Restore (NSR). Seems they support archiving with
>>the 3.1 release available next month and they've just released clients
>>for Windows NT for Intel (as opposed to Alpha), Windows TCP/IP and
>>the obligatory PATHWORKS Window client all available right now.
>>Sitting here waiting for a few more ADSM clients: SGI, NT, OSF/1.....
>
>It's important to have your key clients supported, but there's a lot more to
>evaluating the worth of a product - especially important in my opinion is
>the underlying architecture of the product.
The architecure means diddle when you've got to tell someone it'll be
a year or two before you'll be able to backup their machine. I've
been very consistent in my complaint (and only one of two I really have
regarding ADSM) about the small number of clients and originally the small
number of clients with which it was offered. We didn't use WDSF
because of the seeming lack of movement to provide additional clients.
skip a bit here regarding scaling etc, all fine and good but more
a matter of inidividual opinion and individual corporate requirements Y
>I'm aware of only one other product that uses an architecture similiar to
>ADSM - Harbor. All of the others we looked at were still stuck back in the
>stone age concept of Full, incr, incr, incr, incr, Full, incr, incr, incr...
>Some didn't even support compression on the client side before sending data.
>Do some calculations on how much data is moved across the network in a year
>by the different architectures, or how much server storage you require per
>user - the difference might surprise you.
Amazingly enough many people still want, insist or are required to use
this _stone age_ technique. I don't like it but, I'm required to do it
for certain systems myself still. Several others on this list have
complained about ADSM's lack of ability to do the full, incr cycle.
I've done the calculations and admit to a small mistake reqarding the
difference in compression factors between doing the compression by
software or hardware, in which most cases hardware compression is higher
but at a cost of more network traffic although much faster machine backups
and of course the increased CPU availability on the client all have to
be considered. There are many factors to be considered.
>Some of the products rely solely on the archive bit to determine which
>datasets to back up on an incremental - this bit is not reliably set in many
>environments (dos, windows for sure). This means the incrementals may not be
>backing up all of the datasets they should be. The longer the periods
>between full backups, the bigger this integrity exposure.
>Disaster restores will also be much faster if you use the collocation
>feature - keeping a clients data on as few tapes as possible. Not possible
>with the full, incremental types.
I was one of a few on this list who decided to change to collation and
gave up after a few dozen of the probably several thousands of tape
mounts required were done. Probably not real effective for me anyway
as my ATL isn't nearly big enough to do it right. And I beg to differ
as yes it is possible to do collation with the full, incr cycle type
backup as I do that now at the disk level, due to aging disks prone to
die from HDA failures, on some systems now.
skipped ADSM's easy user interface, it is, I've seen others close but
the administrative interface sucks for VM and Windows (line mode, eeek)
the same for the Sun and Ultrix clients and there ain't one for the Mac
products we looked at that didn't have a decent GUI for admistration
and no I don't see why I have to run OS/2 to get a GUI admin client
although I did just get the OS/2 box in this week but haven't
installed it yet Y
And that's my only other complaint about ADSM but, it's a livable
complaint. GUI's are nice but, easy for me to do without.
>I think ADSM has done well with the clients supported to date (even mac's -
>thank you - many on campus). Sounds like their working on NT and I'm sure
>Windows 95 clients (would 1 work on both?). Anyhow, for all the reasons
>I've listed above, I wouldn't switch just because someone has certain
>clients available sooner.
I'm not about to switch, we've sunk $120K on an ATL for our VM box to
support ADSM, I personally like the product too much to want to change,
we've been running it for some 16 months and have some 150+ clients,
who'd probably come out and lynch me if I tried to make them learn
something new :). An additional plus was to find a good use for our
VM box which is continuing it's decline from a heavily used user machine
with 4000+ users to it's currently level of 900+ users and dropping,
as users move to desktop machines for mail, PC/SAS, etc..
I merely stated there is a lot more competition for network backup
products these days. It seems from the contacts I've had recently that
many vendors are upgrading their products dramatically to include HSM
support either now or very shortly, rapidly increasing the clients they
support and providing much better administration with dataset-cloning,
on line tape duplication and a significantly larger number of media
storage devices. Hence the 'Competition picking up guys' subject.
I think ADSM has done okay with the client support to date, not great, but
okay. You see a fair number of requests on this list asking for other
clients, SGI, OSF/1, NT, VMS. The facts are Legato NetWorker, DEC NSR
both support more clients, Palindromes Archivist already has HSM support,
not one of the packages provided everything we wanted but, many fit the
basic requirements. I still feel that ADSM will be the best for both
our solutions here and one of the best products for network backup/
restores within a few years.
Someone from IBM posted a message some 6-7 months back providing a long-
term look at where they were now and where they were planning on going
with ADSM and said hopefully they'd do it again in a few months. I
wouldn't mind seeing something like that again with the short, medium
and long term I think they gave but maybe a bit more information
regarding client release dates.
---
Keith A. Crabb Keith AT UH DOT EDU
Keith A. Crabb Keith AT UH DOT EDU
University of Houston Operating Systems Specialist +1-713-743-1530
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