On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 11:50:14AM -0500, Major, Rusty wrote:
> I'll throw in my two cents about Aptare.
> It's an excellent product. Very nice, and has quite a few features.
> The only caveat is that it's kinda pricey. However, you do get what you pay 
> for.
> If your company has the money, I'd highly recommend it.

FWIW, we're in the middle of an eval process right now.  We started out
evaluating Bocada's BackupReport and then Aptare's StorageConsole.  The
price was roughly comparable but the two have different pricing models,
so it's quite possible that 1 could be cheaper for you but higher priced
for me.

I've elminated BackupReport from the equation and will be doing my due
diligence with Veritas software this week.  Advanced Reporter has
basically been killed (not officially though) with the functionality
being rolled into CommandCentral.  CC is at version 3.5 but is going to
6.0 within a few weeks.  List price according to the trade rags says it
starts at $22K.  I haven't seen pricing for my environment yet to see
how it compares to my Bocada and Aptare quotes (none of which I'll
share with you!).

StorageConsole is a *VERY* nice product to have.  The eval takes a
half-hour or so to set up if your master server has Internet access -
you can push information to Aptare's server (not backup data - just data
about the backups!).  Work with it for a while and you'll wonder how you
lived without it.

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org