On 11/15/2006 12:05 PM, Tschida, Tom (STP) wrote:
> we're looking at purchasing Aptare for our NetBackup and BackupExec 
> (yes, they will be supporting BE this starting this month) 
> environments.  It's it promoted for the most part as easy plug-n-play.  
> Does anyone have any lessons learned regarding the implementation of 
> this tool?  Any info is appreciated.

Hi Tom,

I'm local to you (in STP) so feel free to contact me anytime.  I've been 
using StorageConsole for a few years and am a very satisfied customer.

The one thing to watch for is to make sure your partitions on the portal 
are large enough.  I used a mirrored 146GB drive and created 5 20GB 
partitions for the data and its backup.  It's been working fine for us 
(146GB is probably overkill but the delta between a 72 and a 146 isn't 
much these days).  Make sure you do have some sort of drive space 
monitoring - I have seen the volume with the temporary table space 
consume too much space (and there's a simple procedure to compress the 
table) and it's not nice to fill a database volume.

Overall, it's been simply a matter of installing the portal and letting 
it run.  The most time is spent on making sure your server groups are in 
  groupings that make sense to your business.  Although it uses Oracle 
underneath, I know next to nothing about Oracle and our Oracle DBAs 
don't need to look at the system at all.  Anything you need to know 
(like accessing the database directly) you can get from Aptare.

Finally, the biggest gotcha is that every NetBackup maintenance pak 
replaces backup_exit_notify and this file is used to add entries to the 
file that StorageConsole needs.  I've forgotten about this NetBackup 
patch "feature" more than once and have a formal change request in to 
Symantec to do something like a backup_exit_notify.local that doesn't 
get overwritten but gets executed if it exists.

If you haven't purchased the product yet, have a really good look at the 
features that are important to you.  Aptare has been very receptive to 
feature requests in the past (a few of the features in the product there 
now are because I asked for them) but it's always easier to negotiate 
new features at purchase time than later.

You will find Aptare a pleasant surprise to deal with.  Sales and tech 
support are both top-notch.

Cheers,
        .../Ed

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