Arcserve2000 or Veritas - Netbackup

[aling]

Does anyone have any experience / opinions on AS vs Veritas - Netbackup?

We have been with CA using versions of Arcserve from 6.5 - 2000, but plan to evaluate move to Netbackup. (2000's nwagent is crashing servers)

I am interested in real user feedback about these products. We are a mixed environment, Netware and NT/2000.

Thanks,
Audrey

 

[ARCserveGuru]

NWagent is abending the NW servers? There was a new NW agent released, it's on CA's support site. Anyway NetBackup is so much more expensive! If you looking at that level then you may as well compare NetBackup to CA's Enterprise Backup.

Anyway, just a thought, and if your abending the servers throw us a line and we'll try to help out.

g

 

[Jakkels]

I have used both Arcserve and Backup Exec/Veritas for years in various environments and Veritas is the better product by a country mile. It may be more expensive, but is far far better. It also has better reporting abilities.

 

[aling]

Thanks for all the input.

NWagent issues:
NW6 with AS2000 universal nwagent
with AS2000 sp3 patch Q0)5692
Novell patches NW6SMS1a and 011210n6
CA patch Qo05996

servers abend on nwagent, and have frequent failed backups due to failure to connect to client agent. Also, although reported to work in pure IP environment, we found that we had to at least bind IPX to a nic, otherwise agent would abend server upon loading.

Thanks,
Audrey
aling@siac.com

 

[albeaker]

I work at a medium size company, with about 5TB of data in our data center. We used to use Arcserve 2k and 6.x before completing the switch to Netbackup this year. We have found NBU to be much more scalable and resiliant in our multi-OS environment (Wintel, NW, Solaris) than Arcserve, and are generally happy with it. Before we dumped CA, we were fighting loads of problems with NW and Unix agents, patches galore, and shabby performance. NBU is definately more expensive, and barely better Tech Support, but is very solid once its up and running. Most of our problems stem from DNS issues! If you can afford it, I recommend it.

 

[ARCserveGuru]

So albeaker, your comparing NetBackup (Veritas' Enterprise Backup solution), to ARCserve (large to small company solution (not enterprise)).

Of course NetBackup is going to do better. However, have you tried out CA's competitor Enterprise Backup which is meant for Unix and NT?

I thought not. Sorry, but doesn't seem a fair comparison.

g

 

[ARCserveGuru]

Also Aling.

Try this. Use the NWAGENT from QO19337.caz, and then apply to your NetWare server qo12831.caz (considering you already have qo05996) and qo19341.caz.

g

 

[aling]

Q019337 will go on our test server today, but because we are using AS2000 and not AS7 for Netware, don't think we need Qo12831 and Qo19341.

Am also thinking to use AS2000 sp4 second release, Qo19251 - 6/28/02 - however some earlier posts elsewhere indicated there had been problems with the first release.

Will let you know results, also the abends are intermittent and unpredictable.

Thanks for input on Veritas-Netbackup vs. CA.

Audrey

 

[ARCserveGuru]

My mistake, I figured you apply all of qo05996 which was the agent, and the server components as well. Must of just been the agent component of qo05996.

Anyway, let us know how the new nwagent goes.

g

 

[aling]

Hi, All,

Long time since the beginning of this thread, but just wanted to provide a status - our server abends on nwagent appear to have been resolved, due to some very good investigative work and persistence on the part of CA Support.

Bottom line, CA support engineer, Bob, stayed OT and on the phone from India, we attempted to recreate abend and observe. There were never any entries in the abend.log, since the backups run off-hours, and the server rebooted itself. This time, watching the console, saw parity error, and now that Compaq replaced the system board, backups have been fine. Abends occured only happened during full \SYS backups, which is why I mistakenly attrib to nwagent. We also now have remote insight boards and can replay failure sequences.

Abends on nwagent from nw5 server: Bob also did excellent troubleshooting. More scheduled possible downtime and observation. This time, appears to have been a corrupted job. Recreated job and backups have been running.

Still no decision re: Veritas 4.5 and AS2000.

Audrey