Veritas Backup Software Solution or Others?

[Steven Chen_1]

I have not used any backup/recover software other than Unix tar etc. But as a new box is ordering, I wonder if someone can share their experience about the selection of backup solutions.

1) Veritas
2) OmniBack II
3) ..

Would any of them are gui based?

Thank you very much for the help.

Steven

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Steven,

Both products are good and both have GUI's. The cost of Veritas is quite a bit more than OB2. The performance of Vertas is slightly
better than OB2 but in my opinion the pre/post exec scripting is more powerful in OB2.

Whichever product you choose I strong suggest that you also purchase a tape library with multiple tape drives. That way backup is truly hands free and you can also automate the process in which you make a copy of your backups for offsite storage.

BTW - OB2 is coming out with version 4 very soon. I would wait until the spec for it are final before making my final decision.

Regards, Clay

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
We use TSM here, (well we have a IBM mainframe sharing the same robot...), its gui and web based...

Regards

[Jim Turner]

Steven,
We have used OB2 for a couple of years now with around 60 servers, and we're very happy with it. We started with version 2.55 with subsequent upgrades to 3.0 and 3.1. 3.5 is the current version, but as far as I can tell, the only major difference between 3.1 and 3.5 is Win2k support. We have plans to go to OB2 version 4.0 when it is released in August. The only other solution we've tried previously was ADSM, but it sucked big time for non-mainframe backups.

Clay,
Reading our situation (above), would you see any compelling reason to switch from Omniback II to Netbackup? I burned up all morning rebutting an email my boss got from a Veritas sales guy. The email was a long laundry list of reasons why Netbackup was better than Omniback. Most of it was misleading or just plain wrong.

Thanks All,
Jim

[Steven Chen_1]

Appreciate all the help.

I am trying to give each one 10 points, but the web site performance discourages me most.

Please don't feel not being appreciated.

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Steven

Both the products are GUI based , and also the licences are tied to the No. of processors , clients and servers etc etc . So it all depends on the Money you have got and how well it meshes with the already backup solution in place . We have an env of 50 plus servers across mainly 2 geographical areas . We run OMNI BACK now 3.5 which runs excellent as we mannage more than 10 TB of produciton data . However to have a nice flavour we order veritas with one stand alone Sun System I 1 TB storage ) which is very sweet too . But as a HP Fan I would recommedn you turing towards Omni Back .

Manoj Srivastava

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Reply for Jim Turner:

I thank God that my boss would never ask me to do that - he trusts me implicitly.

I'll try to be as fair as possible. Veritas does tend to have higher throughput than OB2 especially in a SAN environemnt. This is one of the areas I understand OB2 Version 4.0 is going to address better. But in your case where you already have 60 functioning backups along with I presume pre/post exec scripts that work - wild horses wouldn't make me switch.

In my case, within reasonable limits I really don't care how fast the backups are. I have to
synchronize meta-data stored on multiple application servers with database data stored on multiple database servers. In my case, application data/meta data backed up at 0100 ,for example, is worthless if paired with database data backed up at 0105. I was forced to develop a perl-based sockets client/server package to synchronize the entire backup.
Once the various apllications/databases are suspended, I snapshot the various filesystems and then resume the applications and restart the databases. The entire operation takes just about two minutes. I can then backup the snapshots at my convenience so that speed is really unimportant. This is about as complex a pre/post exec that I've seen yet OB2 handles it quite easily. I looked at also doing this with Veritas but I found it would have been more difficult.

My 2 cents, Clay

[Kevin Wright]

We use Omniback II here, and we are not very happy with it. The database management tools are awful..I hear they completely changed the DB in Version 4, so perhaps an improvement..I find creating a dat archive of the DB is worthwhile as the DB can become corrupt easily.

[Thierry Poels_1]

Hi Steven,
I don't know how big your server is, but next to Omniback and other commercial (read expensive) backup solutions, there is also fbackup.
fbackup comes free with HP-UX and will do great for small systems (couple of GB's). I've always found anything I needed in fbackup.

In addition to fbackup, or anything else, have a look at Ignite/UX to create a bootable tape from which you can reinstall your server.

good luck,
Thierry

[John Poff]

Steven,

We have used OB here for about 3 years now and we are pretty happy with it. We run it here and also at three remote locations. I like it because it has been very reliable and quite easy to learn and use. We are familiar with some of the issues with the OB databases but we haven't been hurt by any of them yet. We are waiting to get our hands on OB 4 to see how that works for us.

We looked at Veritas recently and were impressed with it, but once we found out how much it would cost we had to back off. Clay has a good point. You have to consider your needs for throughput, and if your shop is big enough Veritas might be the better solution.

[Alan Riggs]

We use OB II.

In addition to the powerful pre/post script capabilities, I value the ability to make simple (ie, scriptable) changes in flat configuration files to adjust backup datalists, schedules, etc.

I also find the omniback command line interface quite powerful and useful for generating monitoring scripts, etc. Then again, it has ben several years since I looked at NetBackup, and it might also have powerful non-GUI tools to play with.

Not that there's anything wrong with GUIs. As long as they are *optional*, I'm fine.

I know I can do everything I care about with OB II through the command line and file manipulations. I don't know that about NetBackup (yet).

On the other hand, we are wrapping our NT backups into a unified solution, and OB II cannot yet handle brick restoration for a Microslop Exchange server. Netbackup can. I hear that OB II 4.0 will also be able to, but I haven't seen it yet.