Rob> I'm looking for comparisons of networker 7.x and netbackup 5.x
I've only used NetBackup 4.5, and I can't say I liked it very much.
Rob> Our organization is evaluating software needs and costs. Currently
Rob> we're a veritas shop.
If you're already running NetBackup and are happy with it, then I'd
stay with it. We consolidated from a mix of NetBackup and Networker
at my last job down to a single NetBackup instance. I wasn't happy,
but I'm a Networker user from the early 4.x days.
Rob> If anyone wants to chime in with personal experiences, we'd be looking
Rob> for the following features first and foremost:
Rob> Offsite copies (vault)
I found Vault to be limited in how well it worked. Or more
accurately, it was a pain to run and wasn't easily scriptable to
generate useful reports.
Rob> NDMP backups
I don't think NetBackup can save NDMP images to a staging device, and
then stream to tape later. You still need to dedicate a tape drive
for each NMDP stream you want to backup in parallel. Not ideal in my
book. I know Networker 7.2 should have worked around this, but I'm
not installing it until 7.2.1 is out the door.
Rob> I know both products will do all the above, but I'm curious how
Rob> smoothly they work.
The big issue is how are you going to restore older backups? You'll
have to keep around the server hardware/index disk space for doing
NetBackup restores if you switch to Networker. It's a pain,
especially if you have long retention time requirements. And as you
use it less and less, it's gets harder to make sure you know how to
work with it.
Me, I'm happy with Networker and what it does, I never got my mind
wrapped around NetBackup enough to feel comfortable with it and how it
worked. NetBackup doesn't have the nice 'nsrwatch' command line tool,
where you can *see* what's going on with your backups in real time.
The best feature is the 'throughput' estimate you see per-tape drive.
I find this invaluable for monitoring the system, since you can get a
feel for how well it's going.
With NetBackup, it's not nearly as nice or as easy to monitor how fast
data is acutally being written to a device, and the reports it
generates when backups are done (jobs) are horrendous.
Just my two cents.
John
John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
john.stoffel AT taec.toshiba DOT com - 508-486-1087
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