On 10/10/2006 11:56 AM, Dave Brown wrote:
> We are a datacenter that does hosting of client servers.  In with the
> hosting we offer data backup for our clients.  Currently I have over 75
> different server/client that I backup. I was looking for two things from
> a reporter.
> 
> 1.    A report that will show TBs per month per client/policy

This is trivial with StorageConsole.  You can report by individual 
client or create server groups (say if you have 3 servers that are owned 
by one client).  We've got our data going back a couple of years and the 
trends sure are nice!

> 2.    A way to see open backup windows so jobs can be added/moved

You can see individual policies but you can't see all of them on single 
page like what I think you're after.

> I just left the Aptare web page,  was looking for a 30 day demo of it
> but guess it does not exist.

Aptare has a *superb* demo available - you don't even need to set up 
your own server.  If your master server can reach the internet via 
https, then you can install their agent software on your master and it 
will send the information (status information, not backup data) to their 
server.  You can then get real-world reports from your backups without 
managing your own portal.

Contact their sales folks - they're probably one of the best companies 
you'll ever deal with.  If report #2 is critical to you, ask them about 
having that feature added to StorageConsole - they're very receptive to 
customer feedback (those of you who like the reporting by file system 
can thank me!).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
> [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Ellis,
> Jason
> Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 10:50 AM
> To: veritas-bu at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Has anybody used Aptare?
> 
> We're looking at possibly purchasing Aptare and are wondering if anybody
> has used it before. It supposedly pulls data "real-time" from the
> environment, and I'm curious as to how it accomplishes this.

It accomplishes this by running an agent on the master.  As a job 
completes, the bp_exit_notify script is triggered by NetBackup which 
includes an Aptare entry to add the completion data to a text file. 
There are then daemons that run on a regular basis (you define the 
timeframe) that gets the data about that job completion and sends it to 
the portal.

> Currently we have Bocada (http://www.bocada.com/index.php), a base
> install and haven't really started going into it and actually
> customizing the application to suit our needs.

I really disliked the Bocada software during my evaluation.  It's 
nowhere realtime and I found that the time it took to pull the data for 
our environment was too painfull to use.  The client software was so 
difficult to install that it took their tech support folks several hours 
and multiple reboots to install on my desktop.  This is most definitely 
not something that I would recommend installing on an exec's desktop. 
Aptare's StorageConsole, however, is all web-based so all the client 
needs is a browser.

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org