ADSM-L

ADSM HP-UX Client

1997-04-18 20:47:09
Subject: ADSM HP-UX Client
From: Sam Drake <drake AT DATAXEL DOT COM>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 17:47:09 -0700
Our company is/was looking at purchasing ADSM for our (rather modest)
backup requirements.  The company has 11 employees doing software
development (growing to 20 shortly) using a combination of NT, HP-UX,
Solaris and AIX.  HP-UX is the predominant platform (with NT growing
rapidly).

While I was very pleased to see that ADSM now supports all of the computing
platforms we are interested in, several limitations in the HP-UX client and
server have regrettably caused us to remove ADSM from the running.  Before
purchasing a competing product I want to verify that the information I was
given by the pre-sales group is correct.

1.  The HP-UX server only supports Model 800 servers and cannot be run on
Model 700 workstations.  The try-and-buy server works perfectly on a 700,
and the primary difference between 700s and 800s is in the sheet metal, so
I assume (and ADSM presales support confirms) that this is purely a testing
issue (i.e., the ADSM server wasn't tested on model 700s).  We could work
around this as we have other hardware on site that could run the server.

2.  The HP-UX client, according to the announcement letter, does not
support the VXFS (Veritas) file system.  This is odd, since starting on
HP-UX 10.x (where VXFS made its first appearance on HP-UX) it by far is the
preferred filesystem.  To compare it to IBM products, VXFS is extremely
similar to AIX's JFS while the "older" HP filesystem is similar to the
filesystem on AIX Version 2.

I checked with ADSM presales tech support to verify that this was a hard
restriction in the product and was told that indeed it was.  VXFS supports
Access Control Lists (ACLs) which the old fs does not; if the only
limitation of the ADSM client is that ACLs aren't saved I could certainly
live with that.  But presales support indicates that it's not supported,
period; they suggested that I call back in 4Q1997. (!)

SO, before I abandon the idea of using ADSM, if someone would like to
clarify these issues I'd appreciate it.

Thanks very much,

Sam Drake
DataXel Corporation
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