Jeff,
I am not directly involved with the day-to-day administration of the NT
servers; my main function is as the Administrator of ADSM about which I am
still learning.  I can only tell you about the one problem that I did become
directly involved in.  Errors were being dumped to Seagate and our tech
support group found that there was an incompatibility with the NT tape
drivers and Inside Agent V3.40 for Compaq.   We finally went to V3.4c and
solved the problem; but, this took over 3 months to figure out.  Seagate
said it wasn't their problem and were a not much help in tracing it down.
Finally, Compaq solved the problem.  What upset the tech support group was
that it took so long, and none of the software vendors seemed in a hurry to
help.  It was what they perceived as lack of enthusiam on the part of the
vendor representatives whenever there was a problem that caused them to look
elsewhere.   Perhaps you might get more enthusiastic support in your area,
who knows?

Hope this will help you in your decision making.   All I know for sure is
that ADSM has been looking good for us as the primary backup tool for all of
our servers.  We have a very eclectic group.   Sun, NT, AIX, etc.   There
have been a few problems, but we have always had good support and we get
them solved quickly.

Sandye J. Jackson

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Connor [SMTP:connorj AT NIMO DOT COM]
> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 1998 3:41 AM
> To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject:      Re: ADSM versus Arcserve and Backup Exec
>
> Sandye,
>
> Can you give me a few examples of the problems encountered with Backup
> Exec?
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>
>
>
> "Jackson, Sandye" <Sandye.Jackson AT LATIMES DOT COM> on 09/16/98 06:03:12 PM
>
> Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
>
> To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> cc:    (bcc: Jeffrey P Connor/IT/NMPC)
> Subject:  Re: ADSM versus Arcserve and Backup Exec
>
>
>
>
> Our current environment is ADSM for AIX v3 backing up over 50 clients
> and we have just purchased the licenses for 50 more.   We are still
> adding on.  The NT servers were the first to be backed up on ADSM (there
> are currently 30 in the loop and plans for 30 more) and we have improved
> the day of many users with our ability to restore single files or
> directories on command.   The 'powers-that-be' here tried Seagate on the
> NT servers and discarded it because of and I quote 'too many problems
> taking up too much time'.  Hope this helps!
>
> Sandye J. Jackson
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jeff Connor [SMTP:connorj AT NIMO DOT COM]
> > Sent: Friday, September 11, 1998 2:01 PM
> > To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> > Subject:      ADSM versus Arcserve and Backup Exec
> >
> > Help!
> >
> >      There is a shift going on within our company where many Netware
> > servers are being consolidated to larger NT servers.  A large number
> > of
> > these Netware soon to be NT servers are located in remote offices
> > connected
> > to our statewide ATM backbone via T1 lines.  The new NT servers in the
> > remote offices will contain approximately 6 - 10 GB of user data.
> > In most cases we were not planning on backing up the remote NT
> > machines to
> > a central ADSM server because it would take too long to restore an
> > entire
> > machine in a disaster recovery scenario.  This means, for the remote
> > offices, local tape, probably a IBM 3570 library, would be used with
> > the
> > standalone version of ADSM.  We also thought we might backup the 3570
> > storage pools to a central server for disaster protection.
> >
> >      Our current enviroment is ADSM for MVS v3 backing up 100 clients
> > all
> > within the Datacenter or close by.  Clients are AIX, SUN, HP, Windows
> > NT
> > (Lotus Notes Servers), and 1 Netware server.   ADSM has been in used
> > to
> > backup our UNIX servers for nearly 3 years.  Arcserve is currently
> > used to
> > backup the Netware servers using a DAT tape drive attached to each
> > server.
> > We standardized, or a least I thought we did, on using ADSM company
> > wide
> > about a year and a half ago.
> >
> >      Ok that's the background on to the problem.. A person from our
> > distributed computing group informed me today that they have pretty
> > much
> > decided to go with Arcserve or Seagate Backup Exec to backup the
> > remote
> > office servers.  This decision was made without my involvement and
> > shouldn't have been.. But that's a political issue.. The question I
> > have
> > for you good people is has anyone out there done a side by side
> > comparison
> > of the ADSM single server version versus Arcserve and/or Seagate
> > Backup
> > Exec? Any ammo you can give me that shows ADSM is the better choice
> > would
> > be GREATLY appreciated.  It is their feeling that ADSM is too slow and
> > not
> > widely used in the industry for backing up Windows NT or Netware.
> >
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Jeff Connor
> > Niagara Mohawk Power Corp.
> > Syracuse NY