I haven't looked at Harbor for MANY years. Years ago it was a pretty good
product, I haven't kept up with its evolution. And as I recall it was more
like TSM than Legato is. But the biggest thing it has that I know is
different from TSM is the ability to compare 2 files from different clients
and keep only 1 copy on the server when the two files are the same. That is
pretty neat technology.
BUT, try to think logically about what that really buys you in your
environment.
I did an analysis of our client data here in a review of a different product
that offers that feature, and I found that feature wouldn't really buy us
much. We support 7 different client platforms, but the majority of them
are Win2K. The Win2K code occupies less than 300MB on the client. Office
XP takes another 200+MB. We use client compression, so when that data is
transferred to the server, it occupies maybe 200MB. And that is for clients
that may occupy 2 GB to 200 GB on the server, and our clients are growing
larger and larger every year, with unique data.
Anyway, I actually did an analysis of our data, and the best I could figure,
duplicate data accounted for only about 10% of our total back end tape
storage. And the bigger your clients are, the less the duplicates matter.
It might be more important to somebody who was backing up 1000 identical
desktops, but ours aren't identical.
As for the other stuff:
"periodic backup consolidations to re-organize data to speed restore" = TSM
collocation
And you don't have to do consolidations to get it, you can do it at backup
time.
"... and free up storage space. " = TSM reclamation
It's always been in the product
It is unlikely that you will save significant tape or $ moving to another
mainframe-based backup product.
If you want to save mainframe disk and tape, your best bet would be to move
to TSM on an AIX server (depending on the size of your clients, a WIn2K
server might do). You get the same great product, terrific performance (as
an ex-mainframer I can tell you the performance on AIX is incredible -
wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself), and NO conversion
costs for your clients. You won't have to change ANYTHING on the client
end!
Just my opinion...
Wanda Prather
-----Original Message-----
From: Shannon Bach [mailto:SBach AT MGE DOT COM]
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 9:22 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Tantia Harbor Backup?
Currently our TSM server is on MVS OS/390 v 2.10, and we backup around 50
clients of various platforms. I personally prefer having TSM on the
mainframe, while other servers seem to crash around me everyday, the
mainframe is only platform in our company that has NEVER CRASHED. But as
the clients servers disk storage keeps on getting larger and larger, TSM
does use extensive resources(tapes, DASD) etc. Management is considering
different storage solutions before investing more resources in our current
solution. A vendor from Beta Systems was here yesterday pushing a product
called Tantia Harbor Backup. Evidently it makes optimal use of storage
media by incorporating such features as an automatic file redundancy
checker (AFRC), automatic data classification, and periodic backup
consolidations to re-organize data to speed restore and free up storage
space. It is currently used on mainframes although they have just released
a server version for NT's. As I have never heard anything about this
product before I was wondering if anyone else on this list has. Thank you
in advance.
Shannon Bach
Madison Gas & Electric Co.
Operations Analyst - Data Center Services
Office 608-252-7260
Fax 608-252-7098
e-mail sbach AT mge DOT com
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