Brett> I work in a data center that's, for the last 5 years, had a
Brett> backup "strategy" of attaching a tape drive to every server and
Brett> running fulls nightly.

Gah!  You must have a ton of tape monkeys... :]

Brett> We now have hundreds of servers (both Wintel and Sun Solaris)
Brett> and have a full time operations staff to do, among other
Brett> things, managing tapes.  Recently, upper management had decided
Brett> to spring for a tape library (ST SL500) to backup everything.

Yikes... talk about crazy.  I mean waiting that long for a tape
library!  

Brett> We have been using Networker to backup our Sun servers and
Brett> Backup Exec to backup our Wintel servers.  We are now asking
Brett> ourselves "do we want to stick with Networker to backup
Brett> everyone or go with another backup software solution?"  As you
Brett> can probably guess, the "other backup solution" is NetBackup
Brett> 6.0. 

I've done the move from Legato to Netbackup in a previous job and it
wasn't pretty.  NetBackup doesn't have the nice CLI tools that Legato
has, nor does it have 'nsrwatch' or anything remotely like that.  You
get this screen with hundreds and hundreds of jobs listed on it and
it's just insane.  

Brett> Most of our talent is with Networker but we've had a lot of
Brett> frustrations with the software as well (as I'm sure most of you
Brett> have had as well).  My question for you is this:

Brett> Given the opportunity, would you migrate away from Networker to
Brett> NetBackup?  Or would I be just be trading one headache for
Brett> another?

You'll be trading headaches.  Also, think about the need to keep your
old Networker setup working for quite a while to do restores of your
old backups.  That's a big gotcha.  If you just scale up to Networker
in the center, you don't lose that invenstment.

The other idea would be to leverage the experience you have and just
split the jukebox down the middle, and share the drives/robot.  Maybe
it is possible to have both Legato and BackupExec talk to the library
(through an intermediary) to move tapes back and forth.  You don't
have to retrain the Ops staff in a totally new software, you have the
same software  you're used to.  And the threat of moving to a
competitor should get a good discount on the licenses you'll need.

Good luck!
John

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