While other platforms may be “ports” it doesn’t mean NBU doesn’t run well on them.   I’ve used NetBackup on HP-UX systems at 3 different jobs 2 of which were fortune 500 companies.  I’ve also worked at places where we used Solaris.   It worked fine on both Solaris and HP-UX.   In fact I had more issues out of the box with Solaris because of the st.conf (lack of persistent binding initially and patches that overwrote it – minor rant:  What moron decided overwriting a configuration file during a patch install was a good idea?!)

 

I’m not sure I’d be ready to try using Linux as the master just because the backup solution usually is one you have to spend a lot of time on as an admin compared to other duties and having a lot of horsepower from RISC based systems like PA-RISC (HP-UX) and SPARC (Solaris) gives me comfort.  Also typically the support on these OSes is from the vendor that made both the OS and the hardware it is loaded on.  Linux can give you support from OS vendor and hardware vendor but they’re not going to be the same so you can sometimes get caught between them doing finger pointing.

 

 

 

Edson,

 

You get what you pay for and I compared the SUN V40z (when they came out) to an equivalent IBM (x345 ????, can’t remember) and it was 35% faster and only a few thousand more.

We ran apps, DBs and some encryption software and it was a no brainer. This was all on windows but we also ran tests on Solaris x86 and Redhat and found Redhat had poor support for what we wanted to do. We couldn’t get plugins for the database we used etc etc. We also found that filesystem (about 5%) and CPU (15% for multi thread work) was better on the Solaris x86 system.

 

Just curious to know what sort of benchmarking you did ??

 

You’ll also find that there is a lot more H/W, OS, DB support for Solaris from Veritas than there is on RH Linux but not if you mean Linux in general.

 

I guess some of the SPARC gear has been expensive in the past but when you look at the T2000s and use them for what they are designed for, they are very impressive and cost effective as well.  You also can’t compare some of the multi domain boxes such as the E6900 up to the E25K, they are expensive but for large enterprise business critical Apps I would only use them or a mainframe.

 

I guess you can buy Dell hardware and I have in the past only to find that hardware failure rate was higher and part supply was pathetic. We ended up swapping out the Dell server for a SUN/HP(can’t remember) because we couldn’t get the same motherboard again. They seem to change the parts all the time. This is my experience in Aus and I’m not sure if it’s the same in the US or other places ???

 

Answering one of Aleksandr’s original questions, in particular the user base part:

 

> I think there should be less bugs, better support and much wider user base for Solaris.

I’d love to see some stats from Symantec but I’m guessing there are a lot of people out there using Solaris for their master. In addition to that there would be HPUX, AIX and windows. I’m guessing the rest would be minorities.

 

Finally, these are my opinions coming from what I’ve seen in the past in the various places I have worked at.

 

Regards,

 

Dominik

 

BTW I currently work in a SUN Solaris / HP Windows environment. (with sprinkles of VMS, AIX, HPUX) all being or going to be backed up via Netbackup. Also if anyone is curious we have tested the VMS client and it works fine.

 

 

 

I dont think so.

Sun machines are very, very expensive. With the same (or less) amount of money you can
buy an excellent Intel based machine (with more memory, more CPUs etc)  and Linux with a so much better performance.
I see no difference in support from Veritas for Solaris or Linux. My opinion, of course.

regards