If you’re at NetBackup V6, you can look at NetBackup Operations Manager – it’s free to use and depending on your requirements, it may do the job.  If it won’t, there are several commercial products out there that support V5 as well as V6.  The one I use is StorageConsole from Aptare.  You can check this out at http://www.aptare.com.  The price depends on your configuration – the number of master servers, media servers, and clients.  You can contact them for a quote.  There are other vendors out there too – Bocada is one I’ve previously evaluated but it didn’t come close to Aptare.

 

Symantec also sells the separately licensed Backup Reporter.  They have had several entries in the reporting market but I don’t think that any of them get close to a product like StorageConsole.

 

For both NOM and StorageConsole, you’ll need a dedicated reporting server.

 

The one thing I don’t like about Aptare’s licensing is that you will likely have a different client count for NetBackup than you have for Aptare since they count them differently.  Let’s say you have a blade farm with 8 VMware blades hosting 100 Windows guests.  NetBackup requires 8 client licenses.  Aptare requires 100 – this is a actually a configuration we’re planning today so I’m not making this up.  We already have a 3 node Windows cluster that has 3 NetBackup licenses but about 30 Aptare licenses since each virtual server requires a separate StorageConsole license in addition to the physical node licenses.  The product is great but the licensing model leaves something to be desired.

 

               …/Ed