It's all customers, not just UNIX, people that were clamoring for a new
GUI.
Whilst I was in Product Management in Legato, a survey of evaluation
customers was performed. It was found that, in general, if a customer
evaluated NetWorker against NetBackup for less than 6 weeks, NetBackup
tended to win, a longer period, and NetWorker tended to win.
Why was that? Because the GUI on NetBackup was easier and so set up was
easier, as well as the customers tending not to get into serious
functionality. With a longer evaluation, functionality was more rigorously
tested, and so NetWorker tended to win.
So, to attract new customers, it is obviously necessary to improve the GUI
and Legato needed more new customers.
As for different parts of the GUI being difficult, I agree in some
respects. During the 7.3 beta I gave quite a bit of feedback to the beta
team on the GUI. two examples of what I don't like are:
You label a tape in a jukebox. You click the tape, but it does not remember
the slot, or range of slots, you have selected (Step backwards for Windows
users). When you have now typed in the slot(s) and sent the job on its way
(nsrjb now has a daemon and so is non blocking), you ahve to go to the
monitor window, select Operations tab, and look for the label job, which
will probably be asking for user input (Do you really want to do this?) and
you say "yes". It's just labourious.
When you import tapes now, you have to give a -Y on the command line, or
use the monitor/operations tab in the GUI.
A thing that has changed is that Groups are no longer started from
configuration, but from Monitor
Good things:
You can see what sessions are running, and limit it to restore, save,
cloning, or all.
There is a drive utilisation report, but it is save sessions only - so not
much use in an environment where you do D2D and then stage!
You can now see % complete for a save session.
There are other things, but they are the biggies.
Siobhán Ellis
Principal Technology Consultant
ENSTOR Pty Ltd
Level 10, 118 Alfred St
Milsons Point
NSW 2061
Australia
Mobile: +61 424 750 544
Phone: +61 2 9900 2100
Fax: +61 2 9900 2199
e-mail: siobhan.ellis AT enstor.com DOT au
web: http://www.enstor.com.au
>>> mooney AT DOGBERT.CC.NDSU.NODAK DOT EDU 31/12/2005 3:25:04 am >>>
In regard to: Re: [Networker] Legato 7.3, Ronny Egner said (at 4:14pm
on...:
>> As someone that's never used NMC before, how does the stripped down NMC
>> that comes with 7.3 compare to the OEM'ed Wysdm product (which I think
>> is being called "EMC Backup Advisor")?
>>
>
> OK. What is NMC ? Its 200 MB in size....
NMC == NetWorker Management Console. I've never used it and have only
seen it demoed once, but it's essentially the cross-platform, Java-based
GUI that's going to replace the nwadmin/networker command on all
platforms, eventually. From what I've heard and seen, in some areas it's
much better than nwadmin. I've also heard that some tasks are more
difficult with the new GUI, but I also don't know enough to know what
those are. I do know that the canned reporting features of NMC are
supposed to be very helpful to people that don't know how to get metrics
out of NetWorker using other means.
Siobhan can probably say much more about NMC.
As an aside, it was kind of a surprise to me to find out that apparently
a lot of customers don't like the nwadmin GUI on UNIX and have been
clamouring for a replacement. Maybe it's because I've been using it so
long that it's warped my brain, but I really don't have any complaints
about the native Motif GUI. It's not perfect by any means, but I can
think of lots of other places in the product where I wish Legato/EMC
would spend more time.
Tim
--
Tim Mooney mooney AT dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak DOT edu
Information Technology Services (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
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