We are in the process of redesigning our backup system. Currently we have one NetApp F740, a variety of SUN servers and one Linux machine. The DLT 4700 jukeboxes we use are about at their limit for capacity so it's time to get some new, bigger, hardware. And the software we use is BudTool which we will soon lose support on when Legato EOL's it (we've been told we have support until at least Jan 1, 2001).
So now I'm looking for both hardware and software recommendations. We use both CIFS and NFS on the filer. We want to back up the filer via NDMP with a direct SCSI attached jukebox (or jukeboxes) or via fibre and a Vixel switch (or equiv). We have been looking at AIT-2 which after some digging appears to work via direct connect although our NetApp rep keeps telling us it doesn't. We've been very happy with the reliability of the DLT drives/media and have been burned in the past with Exabyte 8mm. Some of us are reluctant to return to helical scan media.
For the near future we'll be backing up to 500GBs of data/week. We have been receiving interest to expand the back ups to cover more systems on campus which could mean backing up to 3-5TB+ of data. Essentially we want hardware/software which has the growth potential.
We're getting a second filer and for security reasons we need to keep it separate from our existing filer. We were looking at the SpectraLogic Gator library which would allow us to split the SCSI bus and dedicate specific drives to the individual filers. We'd prefer (need) to use 2 backup servers (one for the existing filer/SUNs, one for the new filer) so we need software that can support this.
The 2 main choices for software seem to be Legato (NetWorker/Celestra) or Veritas (NetBackup). What about QuickRestore from WorkStation Solutions? That product has the advantage that the archives are compatible with tar (in the case of disaster recovery). Having software that we can roll our Netware backups into would be a plus.
Thanks, Jeff