Well I did fire up the beta but I can't really say I had time to discover 
anything special.  The items of most interest to me were AIR and the LiveUpdate 
being able to do major version upgrades on clients.  I'm nowhere near having 
the setup to be able to use either but I can see that they would be very useful 
to us if I can.

I would not use AIR for many applications but it might allow us to shift some 
applications from needing array-based replication to restore from backup and 
still meet RTOs.  That could save a bit of money.  Kind of needs a PureDisk 
infrastructure but a pair of Symantec 5000 appliances would drop in nicely.

The LiveUpdate for major versions makes me wish that we had included the 
LiveUpdate client in our client builds for 6.5; we took it out as we did not 
have time to figure out how to set up the back end LiveUpdate server(s) 
required.  It would allow us to upgrade clients from 6 to 7 as required by the 
backup team, rather than depending on OS teams who can't grasp the hierarchical 
dependence of NetBackup on its servers.   The current LiveUpdate can do point 
releases which is nice but not really that exciting.

Of course every new release brings its own problems, reading this group you can 
see some versions are good and some create problems for some people - depends 
which features you use.  When 6.0 shipped we did not upgrade from 5.1 until 
6.5.4 shipped (we aimed at 6.5.2 but slipped...).  We still have hundreds of 
5.1 clients.  Will 7.1 be perfect or should you wait for 7.5?  No idea!  But at 
some point new OS/Application version support will go only into 7.n, not 6.5.n.

William D L Brown

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