HP Omniback vs. Veritas NetBackup

[Sandip Ghosh]

Hi All,

Now we are in a process of evaluating/implementing an enterprise class Backup/Recovery Software. We have got two proposal in our hand. One is Veritas NetBackup and the other is HP Omniback.

In our environment we are having NT/2000, HP-UX 10.20 and Oracle8. If you people have some idea, can you please share it with me? I also want to know the pros and cons for both of them.

Thanks in advance
Sandip

[Nobody's Hero]

Recently I have bench marked Omni BACK II, and Legato and Veritas. All three were very good in performance and ease of management. We decided to go with OMNI. It was cheaper, just as flexable and performed just as well as Veritas and just a small bit under Legato. Legato will kill you on licenses and add on's for rman, oracle...etc....

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I last did this benchmark about 1 1/2 years ago so that it's a little dated. I was comparing OB2 3.50 against Veritas. I found that both were good but that Veritas was a little faster but OB2 had better pre/post exec controls. The cost was also higher using Veritas. In my case, the Cell Server was HP-UX but you may be looking to use your Windows box as the Cell Server.

For me the speed of backup (within reason) is never a big deal because no matter how fast it is, it's not fast enough. You really have to think about splitting mirrors, filesystem snapshots, or in the case of Windows, Open File Manager software. The idea is that you need to choose a solution that will allow you to take down a system or application very briefly, snapshot, bring the systems back up, and then do the backups at your convenience. My greatest need therefore is for power and flexibility in the scripting and there OB2 is a bit better.

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

Hi,

There was a (very) similar question on the Omniback forum
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x7714cbaac6dcd5118ff40090279cd0f9,00.html

Jean-Luc

[Vicente Sanchez_3]

Hello Sandip,

We have serveral customers working with OB2 and with environments similar as yours.

They are very confortable with it.

Regards, Vicente.

[Sandip Ghosh]

Thanks to all of you.

Basically I am looking for ease of operation and easy to deploy. We may be having around 15-20 Servers per site. So we are not that much bother about the max limit of the supported Server and supporting of various OS environment other than NT/W2K and HP-UX. But, yes, we bother about the ease of operation and ease of implementation. I am specifically worried about the hot backup of Oracle. If you people have any experience, let me know.

Sandip

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi
You don'n need to worry much about Oracle Online backups. All (as I know) backup programs use the Oracle RMAN utility for online Backups. In fact most of the backup job is done by RMAN the backup program acts more as a media management system. In this function depends on Oracle RMAN there is little difference in what the backup programs can do (and reliablity).

[Rick Garland]

Have found OmniBack to be easy to deploy/implement. Been awhile since I did Veritas but I do know that Veritas costs more.

For doing Oracle backups have been using a pre/post script that puts the database into backup mode and takes it out again. This is because of the older Oracle 7 version of EBU - did not play well with Veritas or OmniBack. RMAN could be quite different but have been sucessful in numereous restores-refreshes and in DR why change a good & working solution). On top of this you do not need the Oracle integration piece for either OmniBack or Veritas. The database stays up 24/7 with no issues whatsoever.

[Ted Ellis_2]

We had a similar decision to make a little over a year ago... main difference is we use Sybase and not Oracle. I am a lone sys admin here, so management and deployment was on my mind. We went with Omniback.. mainly on cost, as it was about 40% cheaper for an equivalent license set. Veritas kills you by charging for client licenses while HP does not. I have also worked a fair bit with Veritas, and like it a great deal. I deployed Omniback, a new library, a new backup LAN and 40 clients in just a few days.... with no prior experience on Omniback.

[Ted Ellis_2]

And all of our online backups for databases work great...

[Angus Crome]

Just a quick note;

I am not completely sure about this, but I did not notice any support for 10.20 under the new Omniback (Dataprotector 5.0). However, it was from a pretty old beta set of Release notes.
The software update manager only lists out 11.X and NT stuff as well, but this may be a limitation on the Cell Server only.

If someone reads this and knows for sure, please post...

As for which is better, that is a semantics issue. They both perform very well, but Omniback certainly beats veritas on cost. It also works with just about every piece of backup hardware known to man with virtually no configuration problems (firmware versions not withstanding).

Strangely, we use both, because our NT(Veritas) and Unix(OB2) environments are kept relatively seperated. Hope we can consolidate someday.