Speaking from having just moved from a client that for some bizarre reason
thought that moving from TSM to Veritas would be a good move, I can assure
you that you don't want to be part of that train wreck.  Just the
crippling administrivia alone will give you permanent migraines.  God help
you if you need security beyond what DNS can give you. And the multiplexed
backups are only the tip of the iceberg for pain if you intend to properly
duplicate your data for offsite storage.

>From what I gathered from Veritas, they have collected a lot of people
that were laid off from TSM/Tivoli/IBM and they are on the road to making
Veritas look very much like TSM, just naming it differently. (DSSU =
Diskpool, that sort of thing...)  Well, until you get to the underlying
functionality, anyway. I sat in on a presentation at one point where they
invoked sentences that contained the phrase "... just like TSM..." ,
"...and just like Tivoli ...." and so forth a number of times.

I can't for the life of me see where moving backwards in
time/features/capabilities is a good thing, but then again, I'm not a
manager.  Thank goodness.

There is a LOT of pain with moving to Veritas from TSM.  You lose a great
deal of flexibility and reliability.  Going the other way is considerably
easier, in my simple minded opinion.

All of that said, if you are doing a relatively small environment, have
time to do a complete shutdown for every backup cycle, maybe it is the
right tool.
I just wouldn't put it in a sizeable production environment without a
readily updated resume.

They do have some good ideas, don't get me wrong -- they are fighting a
morass of legacy code and that may be what's hampering forward progress.
I just don't see it as a technically-ready-for-prime-time product yet.

OK, off my soap box.
All of the above is just my personal opinion, and not supported by any
factual or hearsay evidence,
yourmileagemayvary,Iamnotalawyer,andIneversaidit.
So there.





Bill Boyer <bill.boyer AT VERIZON DOT NET>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
07/19/2004 02:15 PM
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"


        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        Re: Multiplexing to a single tape


The new release of NetBackup 5.0 has disk backup capabilities. They call
is
a DSSU...Disk <something> Staging Unit. Backups can be directed to the
DSSU
and are then de-staged to tape by the media server as time permits. It is
also cache'd on the DSSU, just like CACHE=YES on a storage pool. I don't
know what kinda performance you get from this, but you can have more
simultaneous bakcups running than you have tape drives.

Veritas now also has what they call Synthetic Backups. This is a media
server based process that combines the latest FULL backup with all the
incremental backups (applying deleted and moved files) to create a new
FULL
backup without having to actually do a FULL backup. New to 5.0, too.

I'm not endorsing Veritas (I make my living with TSM!)...just adding to
the
thread.

Bill Boyer
DSS, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]On Behalf Of
Stapleton, Mark
Sent: Monday, July 19, 2004 1:21 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Multiplexing to a single tape


From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Gill, Geoffrey L.
>I was wondering if anyone was multiplexing backups to a single tape.
>Recently I attended a Veritas class, our "other" new backup
>system, (yes I
>did ask to stay completely with TSM) and they really touted
>this as what
>seemed like a very good means of backup. Unless you have the
>newer faster
>technology tape drives I'm not sure I agree with it but don't have
>experience since disk pools have always been plentiful. I'm
>not sure I agree
>with it anyway because I believe restores would be slow since
>data would be
>scattered throughout the tape. What if multiple restores need
>the same tape?
>Can they run at the same time and if so wouldn't that be even worse?

[sound of hollow laughter]

Veritas doesn't tell you about the sting in the tail of their tape
multiplexing. While it can make for faster backups, particularly with
libraries with a small number of drives, they neglect to tell you that
the de-multiplexing necessary to perform restores makes such restores
considerably slower--as in (sometimes) an order of magnitude slower.

...and after all, I personally don't give a hoot about faster backups;
it is faster *restores* I'm after.

--
Mark Stapleton