We're happily using Backup Exec 8.0 in our NT/2000 environments (and
NetBackup for the filers). There are agents, some licensed separately, some
included with BE, for specific applications. IE, there are agents for
Exchange and SQL that work with the MS APIs to flush the logs and perform an
online backup of the database. There are accelerator agents available for
NT, 2000, 95/98 platforms that have two benefits. In the case of a
differential or incremental backup, the agents scan the local drives to
determine what files need to be backed up. The agent also compresses the
data as it is sent over the network to the backup server. The agent
typically improves performance by 30% on our 100Mbit switched network.
There are agents for the Mac and some UNIX flavors included with the
advanced edition. A Novell agent can be purchased as well. A new
requirement with Backup Exec 8.x and Windows 2000 is that Windows 2000
systems being backed up remotely must have the Backup Exec Windows 2000
agent to fully protect the "system state". I think this means the new
Windows 2000 specifics like AD.
There's no reason you couldn't use Backup Exec to backup a CIFS-enabled
filer over the network. (You could probably even mount the NFS export on a
UNIX server, and use the UNIX agent.) Backup Exec would treat the filer's
UNC like any other NT share - if the Backup Exec account can access that
share, it can back it up. Performance would be my big concern - Backup Exec
doesn't stream or interleave jobs. Throughput over the network is typically
20-30GB/hour. You could run multiple jobs to multiple tape drives - i.e.,
backup vol1 to drive 1, vol2 to drive 2. I'm not sure how it would handle
things like archive bits or UNIX style file permissions.
-warren
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Lee [mailto:pat@patlee.org]
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 10:46 AM
To: Benn, Paul
Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Backup Exec on 760 NT filer
At 19:14 11/06/00, Benn, Paul wrote:
>The latest versions of Veritas BackupExec (8.x) supposedly now
require that all
>backup clients have a backup agent installed. You can't install an
agent on the
>filer.
Not true. I am using Backup Exec (8.0) to backup my Filer and it works
fine. Installing an agent on an NT server would allow the backup to go
significantly faster, however. Backing up over 100 Mbps LAN:
Backup of Filer: 189 MB/minute
Backup of Exchange server w/ agent: 332.7 MB/minute (local disks)
Backup of SQL server w/ agent: 311.2 MB/minute (local disks)