I'll have to disagree with Curtis for once.  I'm on the side of
commercial schedulers though I wouldn't say NBU (or backups in general)
is the main or even a good reason to buy one.  The main reason to buy
one is that there are typically many things you want to do in automated
fashion and across multiple machines.  Often these tasks (including
backups) need to run not so much at a given time but at a point in
processing so as to either not interfere with other processes (e.g. buy
using network bandwidth / cpu cycles, disk I/O) or to insure they occur
after other key processes have occurred (e.g. kick off the backup to
tape AFTER the BCV split has completed, do the BCV synch and split only
after that days billing cycle has completed).

In the shops I've worked with these products they've been a real boon
not only because they do supersede what I believe to be an inadequate
scheduling tool in NBU but also because I can quickly determine where in
the schedules things broke down which often enough was long before it
got to the NBU piece.   Additionally though I know there are many on
this list that would decry the practice it does occur that on occasion
one has to opt to take the risk and skip a given backup in order to
bring systems back on line in a timely fashion after some other process
has had a major issue. 

At my current job we don't have the commercial scheduler so end up using
cron and have cron ssh at jobs to other machines in order to emulate
some of the functionality but this is only time based.  With the
commercial schedulers one can interrupt or defer at job level or
schedule level.  It gives one time to address issues before the next
cron job would have kicked off instead of having to go and insure you've
updated multiple crontabs.   Even without the commercial scheduler we
have to use cron to do many backups simply because we need to kick off
something that will go shutdown the application tier BEFORE the database
tier, then do the backup. 

In summary - if you look at it only as a backup administrator it might
not make sense to use a commercial scheduler but from a full systems
administrator's and business point of view such schedulers make perfect
sense.


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of bob944
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 3:16 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Quarterly Backups and Calendar Schedule

> > of the devil.  Real Men will use frequency-based.  Real Men with
> > purchasing authority will buy an external, industrial-strength,
> > general-purpose scheduler for their enterprise.
> 
> [...] IMHO, "external, industrial strength, general purpose 
> scheduler[s]" are
> designed for general purpose use and not designed for NBU -- and will
> never approach the level of utilization that NBU will get out of your
> resources.  I'd say save that money and spend it on data protection
> management software.

Actually, I was going for the laugh.

That said, my introduction to NetBackup was taking over an Oracle shop
that added NetBackup; I couldn't abide the thought of the backup
software shutting down databases (this is pre-OEBU, pre-RMAN) rather
than the needs of the database controlling the backup.

The respect for complex external schedulers stems from environments
where a) backup is one step in a business process incorporating
significant dependency logic, b) precise date logic and knowledge of
external events is required and c) pathological servers with hundreds of
filesystems.  I expect there are others.


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