Historically, what I have seen for "enterprise" products has been
either NetWorker, NetBackup, or TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager).
They all work, they all can be a pain to properly set up and manage,
and they all can be quite expensive.
While you can objectively compare various attributes, they all have
their issues/quirks. What it really comes down to is what would be
most efficient to implement in your environment.
You really need to look at:
- what platform you wish to run the server on
- what backup hardware you wish to use
- what OSes are going to be backed up
- what applications are going to be backed up
Which translates to which product supports all that, and what is
their cost. And then most importantly:
- what experience do your admins have
If you were starting fresh, with no experience to build from, you
could just throw a dart and be just as effective.
However, if say you are a primarily AIX shop, you would probably
go with TSM. Primarily Solaris/Linux, you could flip a coin between
NetWorker and NetBackup. Primarily Windows shops have a habit of
going with Backup Exec.
But if you have admins that already have experience with a particular
product, or you already have a small subset of your environment using
a particular one, then you should stick with that as long as it meets
all of your requirements. In the long run, both your pain and cost will
be less.
Then of course, all that can be for naught once management gets involved,
because they may have been pitched the latest wiz-bang product, or just
because they know someone somewhere else running X, so why can't we.
For an example of a really screwy environment, I serve up my own current one.
Here we have roughly equal amounts Windows and AIX, a small group of Solaris
and VMware, and a smattering of Linux. So what do they run:
Backup Exec for Windows/VMware env
NetWorker for the Solaris env
TSM for the AIX env
Nothing for Linux env
And they currently have a project to replace Backup Exec with NetBackup. If
I had been involved (I have only been here 8 months), I would have consolidated
everything onto TSM, because they also have a project to migrate the remaining
Solaris env to AIX. The migration to AIX was driven by the fact that had AIX
expertise in-house, as well as a nice contract with IBM. (I was hired to manage
the Solaris env and get it migrated to AIX, as they had no one left for that.)
All that being said, my personal choice is NetWorker (I have also used
NetBackup
intermittently), because I have years of experience with it and already know
its
quirks, and to me it is incredibly simple to setup and admin, even in complex
environments.
Hope this muddies things even further! :-)
Rodney
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