Mark,

If your salesmen are wearing plaid polyester jackets I'd be careful. Talk to a 
Veritas engineer instead.

You raise a valid question. Granted building it on an NT platform is definitely 
less expensive but the notion that it is better supported is nonsense. The 
Veritas folks support both platforms pretty well, I think, so I believe your 
manager is operating on a personal bias coupled with a little sales mumbo-jumbo.

>From the trenches: I too was confronted with which platform and my decision 
>was based mostly on the platform I felt the most comfortable with since I 
>would be administering the environment. Ask any of us who use it regularly, 
>NetBackup is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer. It takes a little 
>bit of brains and time to understand it and use it properly. I'd hate to have 
>to learn that from scratch (assuming you know little to nothing about NBU) as 
>well as tackle learning a new operating platform. I think my decision to "Go 
>with what you know" was in my best interests as the support guy and definitely 
>in the best interests of my customers who rely on me to have their data in a 
>safe place without fail or question.

BTW ... I understand NBU well on either platform but chose UNIX on a Sun server 
as my NBU Master/Media mainly because of the reliability factor. Face it ... NT 
hold a certain notoriety for being temperamental.

My personal opinions and I'm responsible for them.

Regards,
Dennis

Quote: "Time is not a test of the truth"
Translation: Just because you've always done it that way, doesn't make it right

Dennis F. Dwyer
Manager, Systems Software
Tampa Electric Company

(813) 225-5181  - Voice
(813) 275-3599  - FAX

Visit our corporate website at www.tecoenergy.com

>>> Mark Riedesel <mried AT MIT DOT EDU> 09/25/2002 2:15:41 PM >>>
We are about to purchase Vertias NetBackup DataCenter for our mix of 
Solaris, Windows and Linux
servers and our Oracle databases.  Our IT director favors Windows for
the master server since it is less expensive and he was told it is the 
better choice
since the Windows version is better supported and has more features.

However, I am going to be responsible for administering this system and 
while I have many
years experience with Unix administration, I have only user-level 
experience with
Windows.  Would I be well-advised to advocate using a Solaris master 
server instead,
or is Windows really the better choice?  We have only the Dell and 
Veritas salesmen's advice to
go on at this point.

Thanks,

Mark

Mark Riedesel
Systems Manager/DBA
Sloan School of Management
MIT
mried AT mit DOT edu 

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