ADSM-L

Re: Comparison of Backup Products

2001-03-30 00:16:52
Subject: Re: Comparison of Backup Products
From: Mark Stapleton <stapleton AT BERBEE DOT COM>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 23:17:25 -0600
"Richard L. Rhodes" wrote:
> As far as Netware backups go, Every backup product I know of has
> problems backing up Legato.  The last time I tried to get a Legato
> Netware client running on a netware server it took a full week.  I
> had to get from Legato an unpublished list of nlm's needed to make it
> work.  Our conversion to TSM is almost complete for NT and Unix, but
> Netware is being a problem.  There are Netware patches we need
> installed to support TSM, but can't install them due to other Netware
> issues (out of my area, not sure of details).  Also, for whatever the
> new Netware filesystem is, there is no open file agent for it, and
> won't be for some time due to Novells constant changes (what I'm
> told).

In my experience with TSM and Netware, I have never seen a case where
difficulties that were not straightened up with the proper set of TSA
and SMDR modules.

I've got a customer whose Netware 5.1 boxes would abend while using the
most recent NLMs (dated May 2000) from the Novell public ftp site. When
Novell sent them the newest not-yet-publicly-available NLMs (dated
December 2000), everything was suddenly both hunky and dory.

I've got another customer who claimed to have Netware 4.11 servers that
were supposedly identical as far as system files were concerned. Yet two
out of five would not successfully do large-scale restores. It finally
turned out that the misbehaving boxes both had outdated SMDR modules.

My understanding is that Novell will often change the way updated
modules work within the OS, and then not tell third-party app writers
what those changes are. TSM does not stand alone with this problem;
Legato's major problems stem from incompatibilities with TSA, a module
that all backup systems use.

--
Mark Stapleton (stapleton AT berbee DOT com)
Mark Stapleton (stapleton AT berbee DOT com)
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