Jay Orr wrote:
Hey, could you do a review for those of us considering alternatives (i.e. from budtool)? It'd be really appreciated....
Hi all,
I promised to do this quite a while ago. I finished the Quick Restore evaluation last month, but haven't had time to write up the results. So here it is (hopefully better late than never).
Bottom line:
For those who don't want to read the details, we did end up purchasing the Quick Restore software and a Overland Data LXB-7210 which will be attached to one of the NetApps. Our existing DLT4700 stackers will be attached to a Sun acting as the QR server. I think the product will meet our needs. The biggest selling features were the price and their technical support.
Background:
We have been a Budtool customer in the past. I run a Sun shop with 2 F740's as the main file servers. I've got ~200 Sun workstations ~50 of which are backed up centrally. We currently have 2 DLT 4700 stackers and several desktop DLT drives that are used for backup. We liked Budtool because of the price, the non-proprietary backup format, and the easy to use interface. I hadn't yet purchased the NDMP module for Budtool when I learned of the Legato buyout. At that point I decided to look elsewhere for backup software. I've never been a fan of Legato, and assumed (correctly) that they'd take the NDMP support from Budtool and drop the rest.
Quick Restore:
The Quick Restore software seems much more advanced in their NDMP support than Veritas, offering 3 way NDMP so I can back up my filers and Suns in any way that is convenient (Sun to NetApp, NetApp to NetApp, NetApp to Sun). Sun to Sun backups do not use NDMP but are (of course) supported. I liked the fact that both QR and Veritas used an ISO standard tar format for the backup. This ruled Legato out early, since they use a proprietary format. I was impressed that Jim Ward (President of Workstation Solutions) came out to meet with me personally, AND could answer technical questions that the Veritas SE couldn't answer. WS impressed me as a small, technically savvy company that was very responsive to me during the evaluation period. I had a couple small glitches that were fixed within a few hours. The software has the feel of a product written for, and by techies. It's highly customizable, but also fairly easy to mess up. I was not at all impressed with the GUI or the scheduler. The status windows in the GUI left out key error messages that could only be found in the log files. The scheduler lacked any way to deal with our current 2 week rotation of level 0 backups. You can go "day of week" or "day of month", but can't select something like "every other Friday". On the other hand, just about everything can be done from the command line, so I could, in theory, set up just about any schedule I like using cron jobs.
Version 2.6 of QR should be out soon. I haven't yet seen it, but it's supposed to have a much better user interface. With or without the improved interface I think QR will handle all our backup needs well. And since it costs less than half what Veritas costs, it's worth a little hassle with the interface. Like most backup software I don't expect to mess with it that much once things are stable.
If you have any questions about my experience with QR, please feel free to drop me a line. I hope this helps any of you working on this issue.
Lisa Paton Hardware/Systems Manager Chandra Science Center Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lpaton@cfa.harvard.edu