I've worked at a couple of places that used Tivoli Workload Scheduler
(nee Maestro) for batch scheduling for the entire environment.  In such
environments we would always use that tool rather than NBU's scheduler.
I also worked one place that use $U ($Universe) but didn't play much
with that scheduler myself since backups were someone else's bailiwick.

The benefits to such scheduling tools is typically:
1)  You can make the backup job dependent on other tasks completing.
2)  You can make the cross platform schedule dependencies.
3)  The tool itself gives you logs for how the jobs/schedules were run
so you aren't just limited to the part NBU knew.

A couple of ways the above has come into play:
BCV of Production is done on the Production host by one job.  Then the
BCV is split and the copy is imported and mounted on a different server.
Then the backup of the filesystem is done with no DB running.   If the
BCV job doesn't complete the backup job doesn't attempt to run so you
focus on the real issue (BCV failure) rather than red herring issue
(backup failure).

SAP/Oracle backups that need to be initiated by the client.   Such
scheduling tools can be used to insure the DB mode is changed to hot
standby as one job then a second job is done to kick off the backup and
third job is done to change the DB mode back.   Also you can have other
jobs on application servers to stop the applications for cold DB backups
and restart the applications for hot DB backups.  

For places that do batch processing (like monthly bill processing) it
becomes even more sophisticated because you can insure the job that was
doing the current day's bill processing completes BEFORE the DB is
stopped.

I've seen some fairly major scripts for monitoring TWS at one job but
its intent wasn't really to monitor backups but rather overall
schedule/job processing of which the backups were just a subset.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Stump,
Bob A
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 11:36 AM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] 3rd party scheduling

I have seen a trend to stop using NetBackup for starting and monitoring
backups. The move has been to doing all command line backups from a 3rd
party scheduler as part of a true enterprise scheduling, monitoring and
management implementation. NetBackup is simply one of many products that
are controlled by the enterprise 3rd party sheduler/monitor. What are
the drawbacks to moving in this direction?

What are some of the enterprise scheduling and monitoring/management 3rd
party solutions have you recently seen? Autosys? Stonebranch?

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