Moir,Betsy wrote:

> I was wondering if any of you more open-minded UNIX administrators could
> share your experiences with other UNIX backup products and your reasons for
> choosing ADSM.  I'm attending a meeting next Tuesday with a group of UNIX
> administrators and managers to discuss why they should get rid of their other
> UNIX backup products (no, I don't know what they are, but I do know there are
> several of them) and start using ADSM, and I'd like to have as much
> first-hand knowledge as possible before I walk in there.  Among their
> concerns is the backing up very, very large databases in a timely fashion.

   Hmmm....  Well, I can't comment on very much long term use (> 6 months),
but in a previous incarnation I worked with both Netbackup and Legato.

  For the one installation I did with Legato, my impressions of it was that it
was
very nice graphically, but didn't have a whole lot going for it scheduling wise.
You
could choose from a number of different calendaring options, and even set up a
few different types of schedules.  (I was using a slightly crippled one server
version.)
The only irritating thing I found about Legato was that you couldn't schedule a
script
to backup a database and have Legato deal nicely with things --- you basically
were
reducing to shutting down the database in cron, hope that the database could be
backed
up in the backup window, and then start the database in cron again.  Very ugly.
Having said that, for one install for one server, it seemed to do ok.  :)

 During the time that I was working with Netbackup, there were a couple of 
things

about it that I really liked:
  - unless you used MPX format, everything was in gnu tar format.  So, you never
    had to worry about database problems, because if you knew what tape was the
    latest one, you could ALWAYS get to your data.  (Came in handy -- don't want
    to talk about it, tho... :)
  - there were pre and post scripts that ran backups, that were actually fairly
well
    documented.  Very useful for backing up databases or other tricky things 
that

    need unusual care and feeding.
  - the hierarchical servers that netbackup has are very nice.  The idea is that
you
    store data about clients on the local server, and just back up the database
information
    to the central server.  So, you store backup data locally, and inform the
'most
    important' Netbackup server what got backed up. (The ADSM server stuff seems
    a little more than strange in comparison, but it has different design
principles.)
  - netbackup is a traditional unix product, in that it lives and breathes by 
the
motto
    of 'flat files and grep' principles.  You want reporting?  Write a script
that tails the
    logfile and dump out events to syslog, Tivoli TEC, HP Openview or BMC 
Patrol.

   You want to do something outside of what's out-of-the-box?  Look at the file
    formats and do all of the things that customer support people have aneurysms
over. :)
  - from my few experiences with dealing with the support organization with
veritas, I have
    only good things to say about them.  Very good knowledge of their product,
and
    within two-hour resolution time AFTER business hours!

   Taking into account the fact that I haven't used it in about a year, these 
are
my gripes
about netbackup:
 - I've seen people shot over better GUI implementations.  Talk about UGLY!  (I
think
   that it has improved lately.) Unless you use it all the time, it's actually
difficult to
    remember how to navigate through the interface to do some operations.  
People

    are told "Yeah, it's a bad GUI, but it's a lights out product -- you should
never
    have to touch it."  Uh huh.
 - Tape management is manual, and sometimes error prone.  Trying to add tapes
    to a storage group can be a complete pain.  I never got around to figuring
out
    some of the file formats, and then modifying them to add tapes to the 
storage

    group, but it probably would have been much easier to do!
 - Having seen ADSM and its per session statistics, it is a complete pain to try
to
    figure out throughput rates or anything sadistically meaningful using
netbackup.

  In regards to large database backup, I think that something that can do table
backups or incremental backups would be good.  Presumably, with a database
that large, you would be doing online backups, so you would need a tool of some
sort so that you don't back up a huge database file/raw device every day.

The only opinion I can offer on database backup is to avoid EBU. I finally beat
it into
submission, but I'm not convinced that I could bring it back from something
catastrophic.  For a 'recreational impossibility', try doing database backups 
and

restores on a cluster (pick your HA software flavour!).  Not a very enjoyable
experience.  But who knows, in the year since I used EBU, they may have even
fixed the bug in solaris where you can't get it to delete old archives (not that
I'm
bitter, mind you.  And I'm MUCH better now! :)

   IMHO, for a small company, any backup product (including ufsdump!) will work
just fine.  For medium size companies (100-1000 computers), all of the NT
products
start to bomb out, but Legato and Netbackup are still  manageable.  For large
companies, I honestly don't think there's any choice except ADSM, due to its
database
and the incremental only policy.


kells

Any coincidence of opinion between myself and Mainland Information Systems is
exactly that..