I'm afraid I don't have any documentation on the differences, but I
currently run a Legato system and were deep in the middle of
installing a TSM system to replace it.
What do I like about Legato?
simple, you can get your hands around it is just a couple
days.
excellant status display. Your can figure out exactly what
Legato is doing with a quick glance at the gui or a text
based display utility. One of my big frustrations with TSM
is that it's missing this type of status display. At a glance you
can tell mounted tapes, throughput to the tape dirves, sessions to
the tapes drives, sessions to the server, most current messages and
outstanding operator prompts. I'm really going to miss this!
very easy to install (both client and server), at least on unix.
works well for unix backups.
what little nt backups we do with it, it seems to do ok.
It's not know for smooth sailing for netware backups, but I
think that's more to do with Netware than Legato. All backup
packages seem to have problems with Netware backups!
makes use of multiple jukeboxes very well.
support remote storage servers under the control of
a master legato server. Storage servers are systems
with tape drives and/or jukeboxes, but no catalog,
client definitions, schedules, media info, etc. You can
backup remote systems to a remote jukebox, but under the
control of a central legato server. Or, you can backup a
huge db to a locally attached tape system, but under the
control of legato server somewhere else. I wish TSM had this!
Why am I getting rid of it?
The worlds worst support, and I'm not kidding. I got so frustrated
with support that I dropped Legato support and purchased third
party support. At least the third party answers the phone promptly
and really knows the product, but can't fix bugs. My understanding
is that it might be somewhat better now, but only if you purchase
the highest level of support available. If you want to start a
fire storm, join the legato mailing list and ask about support!
One time I had a crashed server. I thought I knew what I needed to
do to recover, but wanted confirmation of this from support. After
8 hours they still hadn't returned my call. I finally bullied my way
to the support manager and demanded 5 min with someone who knew what
they were doing. He relented, gave me my 5 min, sure enough I had to
do what I thought. This was the broken straw that caused me to drop
actual Legato support.
Buggy sftw. I'm on the current release for AIX and I have memory
leaks, hung server sftw, clients that send data at only 2k/s, malloc
errors.
Very client oriented. This is ok for small to medium sized server.
We only backed up 85 clients - it worked ok for this. If I had way
over a hundred then I'd worry admin issues. On TSM were going to
backup all Unix, Netware and NT - over 200 clients.
Interleaves multiple datastreams onto tape. This is a design
trade off in the product and something you can control, somewhat.
If a client can't send data fast enough to keep a tape drives
spinning, you setup for multiple clients to send data to the
same tape drive at the same time. The trade off is that on
restores you must read past other clients data to get
your data. While Legato can backup to disk and migrate
to tape, I've never found a good way to use it.
Legato will clone tapes (copy pools). It's very easy to do, just
one mouse click on the client group setup - one of the few things that
is group oriented. The problem is that the clone is made directly
after the client group finishes backups - during your backup window!
Now remember, you probably interleaved backups onto the tape. CLones
are copies of a clients savesets(filesystems), not a copy of a tape.
So if you have multiple clients interleaved, you must read the tape
multiple times to create the clone savesets. Legato cloning is known
for being slow. If you want cloning to occur outside the backup
window, then you have to script it yourself using cmd line
utilities.
This is my opinion. You will find many legato supporters. For other
views, I suggest you join the Legato mailing list and ask this
question there.
NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
On 26 Jul 2000, at 16:39, Jerry Caupain wrote:
> Does anyone have a documentation on the difference between TSM en
> Legato?
> I know TSM but I don't know anything about Legato. I could check out the
> web site but I know that real life experiences are also VERY important.
>
> Thanx a lot in advance,
>
> Jerry Caupain
>
|
