As I've said before... I try not to bad mouth any products... but
     we've gone through evals of what you mention below... and currently
     are still running Epoch & Palindrome in small campus environments
     where the smaller tape drives/libraries will cover the needs. BUT for
     our large campus environments we are implementing a major ADSM/6000
     roll out... We run 2 environments of RS/6000's (59H & 591) each with a
     3494 with 3590 drives... we require the dependability the 3590 tapes
     offer (over DLT, 8mm, 4mm, or others). I have finished testing the
     functionality of ADSM in teh netware & NT environments and are
     starting today with major coverage. We are covered for another ADSM
     environment for LAN backups but believe the current environment can
     handle the load...(drives will get extra tape storage & 500 more
     tapes) but there is plenty of processing power left :-)   (Whew... I'm
     turning down more new toys... something is wrong here...)  Sometime
     next week we are going to run tests seeing if we can backup a server
     (nt) in Chicago IL on an ADSM server in Tulsa OK... it only has 2.x GB
     on it but you have to start somewhere.... Yes, I'm realistic and don't
     think I'll be able to get away with backing up 100's of GB's over that
     distance but I do want to find out what it can do...
     All the servers we are backing up are being backed up over fiber... so
     we have turbo charged it basically and have TONS of time to kill.
     The queries indicate we are covering @ 1 tera byte of data between the
     two servers...  I've been Soooo busy lately I haven't been watching
     the numbers closely but if I can remember to I'll pull some misc stats
     for you...
     I can say this about ADSM... we started with it @ 6 months ago (maybe
     longer... time flies when you're busy)... we set up the environment
     and within 1 month had piled on roughly the terabyte of file
     systems... and we have 3 active file backup copies with 60 day archive
     mgmtclasses catching nightly full backups of countless oracle DB's...
     Every time clients have called/come by/sent mail needing restores...
     BOOM right there...
     One of the servers even caught the As.Volume.Assigned (?) bug... Well
     I had the fix in hand about 5 hours after I launched a question to
     this list... and even though there were 5 people here who should have
     been right on it we just kept tossing volumes to the DB (quick fix to
     get by and allow us to deal with more pressing issues...)  Well when
     we ran out of drive space we addressed the issue... BUT ADSM DID NOT
     die even though after the fix some nodes expired 1 million+ old files.
     Boy did we reclaim some tape space !  (and I shouldn't mention that
     the fix took a grand total of @ 1 hour to put on and correct the
     problem)
     As before I won't be specific but some of the tests of other vendor's
     products didn't even happen due to software bugs critical to the
     product upon installation...
     As I was told upon reporting misc test results to the high ups...
     "Sounds like a production environment backup solution to me!"
     later
          Dwight
     Storage Admin.
     AMOCO Corp....;-)


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Thoughts on ADSM/6000 ???
Author:  ADSM-L at unix,mime/DD.RFC-822=ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date:    5/1/96 10:59 AM



I am interested in feedback from anyone using ADSM/6000 for LAN backup of UNIX,
Netware, and Windows/NT servers. Pro's and con's will be appreciated. Please
provide performance #'s (backup throughput in Megabytes/sec) and info on your
configuration (Network Topology, tape technology, type of server, client mix).
We are currently evaluating new products to replace our current LAN backup
product (Epoch/EMC/STK Nearnet). All feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Tom McKnerney
Unix System Manager
Phoenix Home Life