Ken> We currently backup our department network running Legato
Ken> networker with backup to a raided disk array (advanced file
Ken> device in their jargon) followed by cloning to a Qualstar/SAIT2
Ken> tape library.

Ken> Our backup needs are increasing and we don't want to buy licenses
Ken> for more file device space or more tape slots. We would like to
Ken> go with Bacula and have no limits.

I used to use Legato at $WORK, and now we're a CommVault shop with
LTO4.  I use Bacula at home on an old DLT 7k library.  So I can speak
from experience on both of these transitions.  

The key thing to remember is that your users only care about restores.

Legato makes is *trivial* to do restore.  I really really really like
the 'recover' (or nwrecover) tool they provide.  Nice, CLI based and
it just works.  

Bacula makes it much more painful to restore a single file.  The CLI
just sucks rocks when compared with Legato's CLI.  I keep meaning to
go back and try to resurect the brecover tool (by Karl Hakimian
<hakimian AT aha DOT com> ) to work with Bacula 5.0, but it needs some
serious performance tuning and other hacks first.  

CommVault is somehwere in the middle, mostly because it's a Java GUI
based tool.  It runs just fine on Linux/Windows systems, but you're
out of luck over an SSH connection from your smart phone when it
really hits the fan.  *grin*


Tape/Jukebox handling in Legato is also better, the 'nsrjb' tool just
does a really nice job of allowing you to manage tapes.

Bacula's bconsole is just ... annoying.  There's very little
consistency in the naming scheme of commands and options.  It's also
not amazingly user friendly.  It's usable and gets the job done and
let's Kern run regression testing easily.  But it's not friendly.



Now, all that said, Bacula and work just fine and do a good job.  I'd
probably recommend you setup a test environment first and see how it
is backing up some of your existing clients in parallel to a small
bacual test environment.  I'd also probably go with PostgreSQL as the
DB, even though I personally use mysql, but that's just because of all
the questions I keep seeing about tuning Mysql for better
performance.  You don't tend to see quite as many for Postrgres.  But
that's my impression, and I'd be happy to help tune a mysql setup.

Good luck!
John

P.S. I agree on Legato/EMC's pricing, it's a shame they are such
gougers.


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