Hello Dan

I was on the other side of the fence when I used ADSM i.e.:  I simply had the
client on my servers and let the backup guys worry about everything else so I
can't honestly compare the two but I can tell you what I've found amiss in
Netbackup now that it's become my job.

Lack of policy based conditional expiration.   The tape expiration in Netbackup
is strictly time based so you must set your full backup retention periods to be
longer than that of your incrementals by a reasonable safety margin.   You must
address all backup problems encountered within this safety margin or you must
change the retention periods on the images  in order to buy you more time or you
will loose the ability to restore.   The end result is more tapes and more
people time to address issues, the benefit is that issues have to be addressed
within a reasonable time frame.

Inability to place scheduler on hold.   I'm not sure about this one but nobody
has been able to tell me how to temporarily place scheduled jobs on hold, the
idea being that no jobs become active while I've got the tape library open for
maintenance and I get a chance to synchronize the media manager database to that
of the tape library before releasing jobs to run.   I don't mind jobs queueing
but it would be nice to simply keep them from becoming active until I give the
OK.

Inability to pre-emptive schedule.   If the scheduler happens to have an
incremental and a full backup scheduled for the same day, I would like to have
the incremental automatically pre-empted as unnecessary since the full would
cover everything that the incremental would've anyways.

Inability to stream backup to two images simulataneously.   It would be nice if
duplicates could be generated during the actual backup, preferably to different
tape libraries so that off site backup requirements could be automatically
satisfied.

Lack of schedule prior backup differentials.  It would be nice if there could be
a type of differential backup that backs up changes not since the previous
backup but changes from the backup prior to the previous backup.   That way, so
long as you alternate volume pools, you can be assured of having redundant
copies of each file just in case an entire tape goes bad (does happen).

Lack of alternating pools.   It would be nice to have it automatically alternate
between two volume pools, as in the prior scenario, alternating pools would
ensure redundant copies would be on different tapes.

Lack of drive specific logging.  I'd like to look at read and write errors by
drive in order to pick up on failing hardware.   It would also be nice to be
able to have automatic retries on another drive with subsequent reporting since
that would indicate a drive problem or a media problem.

>From what I remember, both ADSM and Netbackup have lousy Unix GUI's but I've
noticed that there are things I can do from the Unix GUI in Netbackup that are
very difficult to do from the NT GUI and there are things in the NT GUI that you
simply cannot do in the Unix GUI.   I'd prefer my interfaces to be more
consistent.

Regards,
John I Wang
Sr. Systems Engineer
Steverson Information Professionals

---
Enron Broadband Services
Enron Building 1472c
ph (713) 345-4291
fax (713) 646-8063


|--------+------------------------>
|        |          dsixbury@saint|
|        |          -lukes.org    |
|        |                        |
|        |          11/02/00 12:08|
|        |          PM            |
|        |                        |
|--------+------------------------>
  >-------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                   |
  |       To:     veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu                   |
  |       cc:     (bcc: John Wang/Contractor/Enron Communications)    |
  |       Subject:     [Veritas-bu] Veritas Netbackup vs Tivoli (ADSM)|
  >-------------------------------------------------------------------|



We are currently trying to decide between using Veritas Netbackup and Tvioli
Management System (ADSM).

Does anyone know of pros or cons of using one over the other?  If you don't
know about the other product, is there anything that you have experienced
that made you wish you had chosen a different backup software solution?

Thank you.

Dan
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