On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 10:35:46AM -0600, Stump, Bob A wrote:
> 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?

You still require a significant configuration setup in Netbackup (pools,
policies, etc.), so you will end up with configuration information in
two places.  That can complicate maintenance.  

Most sites don't use them, so you may find it harder to find someone
with experience doing this, or have increased training costs when you
hire someone.

I'm not sure that the ways that the scheduler can launch jobs is
completely available to other tools (although maybe it is, since I
haven't investigated this much).  Firing off a user backup is pretty
simple, but I'm not sure how I'd do the equivalent for an existing
schedule.

The NB scheduler takes into account various local status information
like previous successful/unsuccessful runs, current streams on a
client/STU, etc.  You would have to gather and incorporate all of that
information into the remote scheduler, or you'd have to ignore it.
Depending on your setups, ignoring it can lead to problems.

I've been through this once (but that was with Networker, not
NetBackup).  There was a lot of hope that the scheduler could handle a
lot of off-host processing (disk copies and mounts/unmounts) between
machines and coordinate them properly.  It took a long time to build
because the folks setting up the scheduler didn't have much expertise
with backups.  And I was limited in the ways I could signal Networker
from the scheduler.  It also meant that whenever we had a problem, I had
to work on the backup issue and the folks that ran the scheduler and try
to make them understand the dependency chain that the process was
expecting.  

I think it can still be a good idea in some situations, but it was a lot
more work than anyone expected. 

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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