CA BrightStor Vs Veritas NetBackup 1

[SimonPeh]

Hi Guys,

My company is implementing a SANs network and would like to have a centralize backup solution.

We are facing the options of implementing CA BrightStor and Veritas NetBackup.

There are a lot that preach that Veritas is more reliable and stable compare to Ca. CA tends to be having problem when large chunks of data is backing up over SANs. Would like some view from anybody who have use them both.

Personally, I find Veritas a bit buggy in the Veritas Oracle agent when it uses RMAN whereas CA backup the whole tables in Oracle and allow me to restore individual table.

Veritas is more command-base whereas CA is total GUI which anybody can manage.

Any comments on which could be a better solution for stablility and ease of management ?

Thank you.
SP

 

[PGPhantom]

We used to use CA and dumped it because it just did not go well into an enteprise environment and their technical support was so sub-par that we were completely disgusted and dropped it/them.

I find that Veritas is far better because of it's command line feasability. As you grow - Your requirements change and Veritas allows for you to grow with that change because you can customize the environment 100%. CA is very limited in that sense plus - Veritas logs etc are all text based - Easy to incorporate into customized reports etc.

Personally, having used both - There really is no comparrison - Veritas wins at every turn. One word of caution though - It is tougher to get a handle on but ... excellent support from Veritas and the user community overcomes those barriers.

 

[SimonPeh]

I have heard it before too that CA doesnt work well in an Enterprise environment. That is why I need some confirmation.

I guest I will need to evaluate further on Veritas. I'm using Netbackup 3.4 and was not really happy on the way it works. Looks like Netbackup 5.0 is better now with the new simplified GUI.

Anyway, Veritas do not backup the OS of the Unix right? But it do backup the OS of Windows just like CA.

 

[TimUK]

>Anyway, Veritas do not backup the OS of the Unix right?

Utterly wrong. Who told you that?

It most certainly does backup Unix. I have 400 Solaris boxes here and I don't want to tell the CEO he wasted $1.5m on licences....

Tim

 

[PGPhantom]

Wow - Veritas NetBackup does certainly backup Unix / Linux etc etc etc. It works very well and like TimUK, I do not want to tell anyone that all our Unix boxes are not being backed up

We have actually had to do a few DRP restores under Unix and we recovered very nicely thanks to the backups from NetBackup.

 

[SimonPeh]

Hi PG Phantom,

When u were doing the DRP. I assume you need to install the Veritas master server. Do you restore the OS with it or the data only ?

With Veritas bare metal restore I understand that you can restore everything with it. But with Netbackup, how do you restore a server with the OS and the data, application altogether ?

I have tried restoring everything through a dump in Solaris and digital alpha but with Netbackup, how do u do that ?

Please advise. Thank you.

 

[PGPhantom]

Our master server is Windows 2000 which, in my mind, makes things easier ... Now for the comments from the Unix guys ;-)

Our external fibre array was corrupted on one of our Unix bixes so we lost everything bu the core O/S which was good so in this case all we had to do was restore 600Gb of data.

For most restores, you install the base O/S and the NetBackup software, point it to the master and then restore everything. That is but one way. Another way, as you mentioned is bare metal restore if you use it. In the BMR console, you create a boot didk for the client in question and that's it, from there it will connect to the master, initiate the restore etc.

You can also create a Disaster Recovery CD from the collected DR info and use it to restore your system.

 

[SimonPeh]

Hi PGPhantom,

You were saying that you need to point to the master to do restoring. If the backup tape is taken to a remote site for DR, do we create a master there too and than install the Netbackup software and point to it ?

And wont that be using another machine just for the master?

And if you restore everything, does that mean u are going to overwrite the base OS that you had install with the OS that is in the tape. I dont suppose it works this way.

 

[comtec17]

When you are doing a DR, you can install the OS and Patches, and then install NetBackup, insert the NBU Catalog tape into the drive and run the bprecover command to recover the catalog information.

The name of the new server should be the same name as the Master Server.

If you do not use the built in Catalog backup, then you will need to restore the system state and netbackup directories.

 

[mcm1k3y]

I have used ArcServe since 1996 and am currently using Release 11, which does have some very nice features. However, it still retains the VLDB which it seems is very easy to corrupt. Corrupt databases can be initialised using the Server Admin interface, but often this doesn't actually initialise the database and I have had to stop the database engine, copy out the corrupt database files and copy in a fresh set of database files kindly provided by CA support - which has improved greatly over the years. The other day the asjob database got corrupted - how I don't know but luckily I could fix it using the dbfix utility. We backup 553GB which doesn't seem to be a lot judging from some of the posts in this forum but for ARCServe it might just be a bit too much. If the datbase was more robust it would be a good product. Unfortunately it ain't and I'm looking to move the NetBackup 5.0 and this is from someone who actually likes ARCServe !

 

[SimonPeh]

From what I understand traditionally Arcserve has not been able to backup huge data file well comparing to Arcserve.
But recently, I had met up with them and they had a new software for Enterprise version called BrightStore Enterprise Backup (BEB)which is catered to Enterprise Environment.

The reason why I'm thinking of moving out from Veritas because it had been rather expensive and we are having lot of problem with our Oracle backup and recovery which required lot of redo logs from our backup tapes and if one of the redo logs is missing we could have problem restoring. BED has this function of restoring from the Tablespace which is interesting apart from the everything else. It free up my time and the Oracle DBA troubleshooting in commandline in Veritas compare to BED which is in GUI.

I wish to delegate the backup portion to our operators that why BEB GUI interests me for simplicity. Veritas do has it's value but I really hope they could improve on GUI and their structure or media server, master server which has so many tiers. You need to take up a course just to use Veritas but Arcserve just install and go.

Just my 2 cents worth ...