How happy are you with NetBackup? 1

[flood0]

My company is switching backup products. We are finally dropping CA ARCserve (I've been screaming about this for years) and we are moving up to a full sized, grown up backup product. Veritas NetBackup is in the front running along with Legato. How happy/comfortable are the veterans here with NetBackup?
We're dealing with 100-150 Windows 2000/2003 servers with about a dozen SQL severs and another dozen Exchange servers.

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

 

[creakyjoe]

very good product, well we're still at 4.5FP6 (have been using since 3.1.1). Am still unsure of upgrading to 5.1 as all is working fine. We also use other Veritas products too(i'm talking just Unix here) - Volume Manager, File System, Flashsnap etc. Fantastic products but support yourself as much is humanly possible, Veritas support (on the whole) has been horrible for me. For years we had all support direct thru Sun (even for the Veritas stuff) and they were 100%. Once we moved support to Veritas, my god, what happened there!. The worst example is they were paid to come in and upgrade our 3.4 setup to 4.5 (bosses paid them to do it as i said i didn't want to do upgrade whilst we were knee-deep in relaying out our SAN just after a SAN crash !). Anyway they came in , broke our setup then took 3 weeks !!! to fix it. No matter what my findings were for those 3weeks, Veritas thought they knew better. Well they didn't have a clue - our new support organisation (Fujitsu) fixed it. Quite a few times Vrts support have been without a clue and either myself or Sun have fixed it. Another big problem (imho) is that vrts now force you into upgrades so you have no choice if the newer product isn't enterprise ready. Sorry for long post

Rich

 

[RustyMajor]

I think support is great, overall, for those smaller, more common problems. When you find a strange problem is when it starts going downhill. I've been the admin for 3+ years and usually am able to fix things myself before support can.

Strange how some people have a lot of problems with Windows and SSO environments. We are a 100% SSO environment and after working with it for 3+ years, I can tell when we're losing drives on one or more servers and can fix it without too much hassle (just have to add/remove the necessary drives in the GUI). I think once we upgrade to a new library, things will be quiet on that front. The big thing to remember here is to use persisten binding on your HBAs.

NetBackup also has an online troubleshooter within the application that is very helpful. It's what the phone support guys will have you do anyway, so always try that first.

It's light years ahead of ArcServe. I can't comment on Legato as this and ArcServe (and BackupExec) are the only backup software I've used.

 

[Flave]

Hi

As long as you don't working in an heterogeneous network nor in a SAN environment, you better keep hands of NetBackup - it will be to expensive. You rather would work with cheaper tools (CA, BackupExec or so), but it also depense on the amount of data you will backup.

Don't understand me wrong, I personally love NetBackup and I think it is the most professional backup tool, but for some environment it is too big and somehow an overkill, and some feature you probably never will use but you will pay for it anyway.

Cheers
Flave