Hello Craig Ruefenacht, Your inputs are valuable as it's from a real user
(no pre-sales!).
Just out of curiosity, how do you manage the index/catalogues when it grows
large with Commvault?

-Shyam


On 8/4/06, Craig Ruefenacht <craig.ruefenacht AT us.usana DOT com> wrote:

Hi,

I'll chime in on this discussion.  I don't want to come across as bias
toward Commvault - I've used Veritas, Legato, Commvault, Amanda,
ARCserv, just about every backup system, and I think that they all have
their place.

We migrated from Legato to Commvault in January of 2006 (so 7 months
ago).  It wasn't a decision that I had any real input on.  Our Legato
Networker install wasn't broken in any way....

Currently we still run Legato Networker 7.1.3 for a few of our legacy
systems that Commvault simply doesn't support (Novell Netware 5.00 is
not supported, though Novell 4.x and 5.1 and onward are, and is the only
reason why Legato is still used for any backups).

We have never used some of the "advanced" features of Legato (such as
disk staging), so I am not in a position to compare some of Legato to
Commvault, but overall, I have been happy with Commvault.

One of the big things for us was we have 11 international sites, and
with Commvault, doing an upgrade is about 4 mouse clicks in the GUI
(Java, so it can be run from anywhere that has a network connection to
the Commvault server).  All upgrades are pushed from one place (and it
mostly works, sometimes I have to manually do an upgrade on a old Linux
Redhat 8.0 machine).

Everything is done from the Java GUI.  All backups, scheduling,
recovers, configuration, tape management - everything.  Its a one-point
administration design.

Commvault does have a CLI, but it is limited in what you can do with it.
I was hoping that it would have more features in the CLI (I'm a
Unix/Linux guy), but, alas, it doesn't.  You can do things such as start
backups, check backup status, and change certain things about client
backups from the CLI.

Reporting out of the box is much better than what comes with Legato.  I
know of third-party scripts and stuff that has been written for Legato,
but Commvault comes with all of that out of the box.

Our enviornment on Commvault consists of Windows 2000/2003, Novell
Netware 6.0, HP-UX 11i, Solaris 7/8/9, and Linux (RedHat
8/9/AS2.1/ES3/ES4/FC3/FC4/FC5).  We have about 13 libraries (Spectra
Logic) connected to Win2003 and HP-UX 11i, and have had little to no
issues with them.

Scheduling, as others have posted, is policy based.  The other plus for
us is that scheduling is also based on time zones.  So, say the
Commvault server is in the Mountain Time Zone (Utah), and I have a
server in Tokyo.  I want to back up the Tokyo server at 3:00am Tokyo
time.  So I create a schedule for 3:00am and put the schedule on the
timezone that Tokyo is in.  It'll run at 3:00am Tokyo time.

Support from Commvault itself is much better than it was from Legato
from my experience.

The only drawback that I don't like about Commvault was that the
Commvault server had to run on Windows, because it required MS SQL as
its backend database.  There is no getting around that.  But everything
else can be on Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, and other UNIXs.  I rarely have to
touch the Windows 2003 server running the Commvault server though.  I do
99% of the administration from Linux Redhat FC5 and Debian 3.1, thanks
to Java.

If anyone has any questions about Commvault versus Legato, feel free to
contact me off-line.

And remember, what may fit our situation may not fit yours.  Your
mileage will vary.

--
Craig Ruefenacht
UNIX Systems Administrator
USANA Health Sciences
http://www.usana.com



On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 14:27 -0700, Ballinger, John M wrote:
> Anyone out there using/used CommVault.
> We are currently using NetWorker but are considering moving to
> CommVault.
> I'm still learning about it but apparently it has no command line
> interface.
>
> Thanks - John
>
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