So I just passed my 1 year anniversary of working for my current company...whee. Thinking about that, and knowing why they brought me onboard (computer backup experience), I started looking around the site to see...NO VERITAS reviews. I answer emails about it all the time, so I thought I'd share my Epinion with everyone here.

I came into the company as they were beginning to phase out their old backup software and implement NetBackup. They had previously been using Legato (I'll write about them later). My experience with Legato was limited to a single 10 year old Sun SparcServer 2000 in the basement of our downtown building that used Legato to back up to a little 8mm tape library. Let me tell you, I'm glad the box never crashed, because I would have quit before I had to restore that system. Anyway, suffice here to say Legato sucks.

There was a big project before I got there, and we almost didn't go with NetBackup. Good thing we did. The implementation is easier, the environment in more flexible and more expandable, and you can get a lot more information out of the software provided than either Legato or SCH REELS, the other package we used at my last job.

The setup goes something like this: Install packages on your master server. Configure the master server to see any local tape drives. Restart NetBackup. Type like a madman to add the name and system type (ie. Solaris,2.6 or Intel,RedHat) to the list of clients. Set up dummy schedules. Go to the command line, and loop over the client list to issue the command to FTP the software to every client. Log into client, run install script, done. Then you can go play with schedules and include lists and all that detail stuff you assign the junior admins to do.

NetBackup is a 3-tiered architecture. The Master server controls all the scheduling, keeps track of all the clients. The Media servers (which the master can be) keep track of all the image indexes for the clients which run backups to it. Then there's the lowly clients.

NetBackup talks to a number of tape silo's itself, and will talk to Storagetek's ACSLS in a pinch. It recognizes just about every tape drive we've thrown at it, and for the most part doesn't severely bog the system down (unless it's a media server and you've configured a 128M write buffer for each of the 11 tape drives attached to the system with 2G of memory :).

Everything is handled by various processes that are specialized in what they do; I still have the process flow diagram on my wall for troubleshooting. This is a blessing and a curse. Unlike Legato which seems to only be able to do one thing at a time, our main Master/Media server backs up about 70 UNIX clients over the network every night. The other Master/Media server backs up about 150 NT clients every night. We've got a fairly diverse mix of NT, Solaris, AIX, DEC Alpha, and Linux boxes, and if we can figure it out, we'll have an AS/400 or two in the mix. We're using NetBackup extensions for Exchange on NT, and SQL-Backtrack for our Oracle databases. And probably the SyBase ones too...the DBA's just call me when things break.

The software is VERY complex, though. Good and bad. Bad in that when some client decides it's not going to back up and throw me error X, I have about 8 log files (maybe only 4...) to dig through to find the actual cause for the error. However, bacause of all the parts and pieces, we've written a lot of software to generate reports and web pages, monitor drive statistics, interface to CA-Unicenter, and other housekeeping tasks.

And speaking of reports; the good reporting software doesn't come with NetBackup - that's another piece you have to buy. And so is Vault, NetBackup's tape duplication and offsite storage implementation. At least Vault comes with a Veritas person to come do work for you, because it wasn't even close to working out of the box for us. After about 2 months of 3 people playing with it, we almost had it running right. Of course, we're changing the vault setup in another month, but oh well.

Outside of that, I don't ever hesitate to tell people to use NetBackup for an Enterprise backup solution. It's flexible and expansive, powerful, and runs a whole heck of a lot better than that other software. If you're not running an "Enterprise", but rather some smaller number of servers, I'd suggest getting one of their pared-down or less robust backup packages, like BackupExec (Yes, as in Seagate BackupExec, Veritas bought Seagate Software). They work just as well, have some technology shared between them, but aren't quite as powerful or all-encompasing when it comes to platforms. But for backing up everything _and_ the kitchen sink, go for NetBackup.



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