We’ve been running Aptare’s StorageConsole for several years.  The install is fairly easy and if you need help, Aptare will help you.  I’m guessing that the install was done in an hour or two.  Configuration is trivial – the hardest part, if you choose to make it so, is setting up the server groups.  We’ve chosen to group our servers by site so every ime a server comes online, we have to manually add it to a server group so that we can report on job sizes by site.  You can choose to leave everything in the default site and it will work just fine.  We currently have 2 NetBackup master servers reporting in.

Earlier this year we added reporting for Backup Exec – we have a Backup Exec central admin console and have a StorageConsole collector on it.  We’ve run quite a few reports out of StorageConsole that combine Backup Exec and NetBackup and also can generate reports that are specific to one.  Overall, it does an excellent job – a *LOT* better than Bocada did a few years ago when we tested it (it was absolutely horrible at mapping exit codes).

Support in general has been good although you’ll want to do any upgrades to SC when they’re open – I’ve run into a few cases where upgrades haven’t gone smoothly although the last few have been great so they’ve obviously done some work on their upgrade tools.  They’re not 24x7 and there have been cases where they’ve been slow to respond, especially via email.  Other times, though, I’ll get an email at really odd hours when they’re definitely not open so they may occasionally catch up after hours.   A phone call or an escalation email has helped in all cases.  Once you do get somebody working on an  issue, they’re typically very knowledgeable, friendly and professional.  I have not reported an important bug that they haven’t fixed (yeah, there’s a date display bug in Firefox that isn’t there in IE but that’s not really important).  They speak real English although occasionally with an Aussie accent J

I haven’t looked at the EMC product at all (didn’t even know they had one) but I would not hesitate to recommend Aptare StorageConsole.  Since EMC owns a backup product, I would expect them to focus more on it than NetBackup.  Aptare’s core started on NetBackup and rest of the backup products were added later.  Expect the NetBackup reporting to always be top-notch – note that they’re one of the first to formally announce NetBackup 6.5 support.

               …/Ed