ADSM-L

Re: Comparing backup solutions

1998-07-13 13:35:36
Subject: Re: Comparing backup solutions
From: David Hendrix <dmhendri AT FEDEX DOT COM>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 11:35:36 -0600
Wood, Gary wrote:
>
>   David, you wrote last month :
>
> "GEMS sounds great but I haven't experienced it.  Even now, I am
> finishing a white paper review of Omniback II, ADSM, Networker,
> Alexandria, and Netbackup. "
>
> If you don't mind sharing them, I would be curious what conclusions you
> came to.  We too are considering replacing ADSM with Legato ( or
> Netbackup ).  We currently are moving off the mainframe
> so we are likely looking at a Unix-based solution.  We'd like to make
> the best choice.
> Any suggestions ?    Thanks ..
>
>   Gary Wood    (914) 285-5174

Gary,

I can't share detailed results, but I will offer my opinion.

We had five products in our RFI.  ADSM came out on top, Netbackup
second, Networker third.  We are taking those 3 and doing hands on
evaluation at this point.  Since we already have 22 ADSM servers and
hundreds of clients with all three major RDBMs on the big three UNIX
platforms, validating and evaluating ADSM will be easy.

I had the other vendors visit me the past two weeks to help install and
configure and go through some questions.  We also had deployed Networker
on some field systems over the past few years and were familiar with the
product.  Here are my impressions at this point:

1. Support from Legato was never at the enterprise level in the past.
The tech guy who came here had no idea how to configure 3494+3590
devices (and other tasks which should have been obvious) and there was
no documentation to do so - Legato is still struggling in this area.  He
had only been at the company a few months - but...
2. Veritas brought in a tech guy and a pre-sales person from Denver.
The pre-sales guy had been with Veritas only two months, but knew the
product VERY well.  I had no problems setting up the 3494s (the doc is
complete but VERY scattered - plus no simple doc telling you "these
daemons need to be up and running after install", etc.).
3. IBM support - well, others may complain, but compared to the rest
there is no comparison.  FedEx demands high levels of support and IBM
has met those levels - of course we pay for it, but that would be the
case with any vendor.
4. Operational issues:
        a. We often have large clients and therefore need to backup to local
           devices.  This requires us to install ADSM server code.  We don't
want
           to have the catalogs on that client.  Server-to-server comm is a
           start, but networker's storage node and Netbackup's slave server
           ideas are better.  We could eliminate 10 server cats and reduce
admin
           costs if ADSM would allow catalogs to be stored on another ADSM
server.
           (export/import is not viable)
        b. Multiplexing clients to sequential devices.  Networker and Netbackup
           both allow this but watch out for the restore nightmare.  3.1
netbackup
           allows multiplexed restores but we haven't done the hands on testing
           yet.  This is not a huge item, but would help maximize our use
           of those expensive 3590s.
        c. We have redundant server clusters.  This means we have volume groups
           with filesystems that have their own IP.  ADSM is a breeze to setup
           in this config.  My initial experience with Netbackup is that it is
           not so straight forward.  Reason: we use Autosys.  Using either
           the networker or netbackup scheduler and the classes/groups, it is
           okay.  Using an external scheduler is more convoluted and difficult.
        d. DB extensions for netbackup are expensive.  ADSM for the big three
           with backtrack is a freebie.  Onbar is completely free.  The oracle
           agent is too expensive.  Legato provides the business suite, but we
           have not received that software yet.  IBM would be smart to suck it
up
           and simply bundle them together with the client code and give it for
           free - they do that with the Xopen API and their own API (which
backtrack
           uses).  Why not with the rest?  The ADSM client is the cheapest, but
           those databases hurt.  All of them have good platform support, but
           IBM has done agents for products outside of announced APIs (like
Notes,
           etc).
        e. DRM on ADSM.  Vaulting on Netbackup.  I am not sure what Legato has.
           DRM for adsm has that great prepare statement.  We've used it.  It
works.
           Vaulting for netbackup is 15K - but you only need it on the master.
           I wouldn't do Netbackup without the vaulting.  It doesn't do the
           scripting as far as I can tell at this point.
        f. Central Admin.  I've seen ADSM.  I have not seen GEMS.  Legato would
not
           even install it in my test environ - they want me to come to their
corp
           headquarters and see it in a "stable" environ.  Hmmmm...does it
work?
           Veritas has a Java console that I haven't been able to run yet.
They
           have a master server idea and all classes and other things are done
           centrally from there.  That's nice, but as I look at it and use it -
           it's not much better than my solution: html.  The V3 server has the
           admin html interface.  This fit's perfect with the many pages I have
           constructed for admining the servers we have.  What's missing is
           a "master" concept for client option sets, mgmt classes and
policies.
           I would also love to see webshell on every platform.  As it is, if
           a client misses a backup the ops staff can select the server and get
           a list of clients, select a client and either bring up a web
interface
           or a telnet session to perform a manual backup.  My goal is to make
it
           as simple as possible for the operations staff, and use the intranet
           and browser as a central point of administration.  I'm half way
there,
           IBM has to do the rest.  Netbackup can bring up an X-window
interface
           to a client from the central management console - pretty cool -
except
           I would have a master server in COS admined in MEM which would be
           comparitively slow for X-windows.
        g. Throughput - we'll see.  The fastest product I have seen so far with
           absolutely miniscule overhead is alexandria.  Also, moving from an
           incremental forever paradigm will impact our network.  We'll be
looking
           at this closely.
        h. Installation - not a biggie for you maybe, but we like to use the OS
           facilities (swinst, pkgadd, installp, etc.).  Only ADSM does this.
           Netbackup has a goodies dir with a bunch of very useful utilities
           that anyone implementing the product would use, plus a cool way of
           pushing client binaries out.  We would need to adapt it to Tivoli
           courier.
        i. We have a barometer test case for all three products: a server with
           >1.5 million files.  ADSM v2 could not handle it.  V3 can.  Can the
           others?
        j. The last thing I can say is - we have already deployed ADSM.  There
will
           need to be compelling reasons to replace it.  Can either product
           convince us?  Possibly.

I have probably said more than I should.  I wouldn't consider what you
are doing as a replacement.  Evaluate the products based on what you
consider to be important for your business.  I hate to say this (because
it'll probably bite me), but we have never been unable to recover a
server with ADSM.

Thanks,

David Hendrix
dmhendri AT fedex DOT com

--
According to my best recollection, I don't remember.
According to my best recollection, I don't remember.
                -- Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo
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