> Their QA really dropped the ball with this release.

 

If by “this” you mean 6.0, you may possibly be right.  With 6.5, that has yet to be proven.

 

I feel rather sorry for the NetBackup QA group though – they have a *huge* challenge testing each release because there are so many variations possible in customer configurations.  Dozens of client operating systems and versions, varying sizes from small to 20+ media servers and combinations like you wouldn’t believe – a large mix of master and media servers plus all of the clients and a boatload of options.  SSO was originally for 2 or 3 media servers and not too long after that you’ve got customers with 25-100 media servers.  Some customers have environments that meet best practices but many don’t.  Some customers do stuff that isn’t supported – a lot don’t even know how to manage a DNS at all.  Some customers have huge databases and some have a billion files (we’re well over a billion here).  It’s impossible to QA all of the combinations and long gone are the days where a vendor could test every possible combination before certifying.   Some write images to disk, some to tape, some to multiple simultaneous tape libraries, and some to disk that emulates tape.  Some people throw encryption devices in the middle and some throw miles and miles of network between their media servers and their tape drives.  Sometimes they exceed the specs doing so (been there, done that) and then wonder with they’re getting SCSI errors over fibre.

 

If they had to QA every possible combination that they support, it would take so long that you’d never see another new release.  Sometimes they just have to code it, hope it works, and fix the edge cases where it breaks.  When you think long enough about how hard of a problem it must be, you’ll realize it’s a miracle it’s as good as it is.  After all, if it was really that bad of a product, why are we all still running it?    If testing is so easy and so cheap, why don’t we all have test environments of our own?  After all, we know what kind of workload we’re going to be putting through it a lot more so than Symantec does so it should be easier for us.

 

> Maybe one day I'll run into the NB product manager.

There’s a lot more than 1 product manager – the product is that big.  I drive by the developer’s offices every day to work so I’ve met a few of them and a few of their support folks and met more than 1 product manager.   Generally, they’re good people and do the best they can with the resources they have.  Perhaps beating them up is just too easy on the list.

 

               …/Ed

 

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Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD

Mounds View, MN, USA

mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT orrg