Opinion/Experience re: LTO drives, Arcserve 2000 vs. Veritas

[jpp]

Anyone have an opinion/experience re: using LTO technology, and using it with Arcserve 2000 vs. Veritas?

My company needs the higher capacity and speed that LTO can provide. However, that means I have to upgrade our Arcserve 6.5 for NT to Arcserve 2000.
After the dust clears, its $2000 just to upgrade the software, - the base product + the tape library support option + now CA is charging for the NT and Novell standard client agents !

I honestly don't like Arcserve. I constantly have to babysit it because of various errors, many that relate to the backup databases. I am thinking of taking this opportunity to switch to Veritas, but that means probably $3000 software investment (Veritas also charges per agent)
However, I am not experienced with Veritas.
Any opinions/experiences on LTO, Arcserve 2000, and Veritas would be much appreciated.

 

[Electro]

I'm not familiar with the LTO technology (or at least I don't know that acronym). However, I can tell you that having used multiple versions of Arcserve and Veritas that they both are very good. Veritas however I believe is the better product of the 2 for ease of use and configurability. Veritas usually is of course the more expensive of the 2 products but as they say - you get what you pay for. This is too true with these 2 products.

My recommendation would be to go with Veritas if the client can afford it, otherwise Arcserve should suit your needs.

Thanks,

Darryl Brambilla
EDS Canada

 

[JRJoop]

Arcserve vs. Veritas;

Hello, I'm not familiar with LTO as well but I have an opinion as to Arcserve vs. Veritas. After switching companies I've had to jump from Veritas to Arcserve. My impression with Arcserve is rather poor. I agree that you spend a lot of valuable time baby sitting various erros and the database. I did not have this problem with Veritas and found less of a problem doing restores. I recommend Veritas as well if your budget will allow. I believe you will find a cost benefit in having to spend less of your time with Veritas troubleshooting error messages.

Good Luck.

 

[ARCserveGuru]

I have worked with both backup exec and ARCserve as well.

In my absolute honest opinion, Backup exec is a lot easier product to configure and use, but the problem is that it lacks in the "stuff that it can do" category.

With ARCserve you can do almost anything, which is why when you have so much more that you can do, there is so much more of a chance of something going wrong. I have had a few issues with ARCserve in the past (babysitting errors) but once those errors are resolved and you don't break it (as in stopping a job whilst it's updating the database or something silly like that) then it's rock solid.

However, if you don't need all that fancy functionality and everything then go backup exec, it can do pretty much just as much as ARCserve can (as in database support and agents and stuff).

g