Anybody out there in Toasterland using SyncSort Backup Express? Would appreciate any first-hand insight -- I have a customer asking me to price it out for him, and I'd like to know how it stacks up vs. other products I know better (Veritas, Legato, CommVault, Workstation Solutions, etc.). TIA. Joe
I've been evaluating Backup Express for a little while now. Along with Time Navigator (maybe Veritas soon). We eliminated all the others for one reason or another.
There are alot of thing in BackEx I like (as compared to Tina) but there are two big problems that we've found with it. The tape duplication process tries to make an exact copy of the tape. For Vault copies this can be a concern if you dest tape is a bit shorter than the original. The data will just fall off the end of the tape. Plus the software feels somewhat on the flaky side. I'm finding a variety of things that should work but don't, plus having to restart the GUI or the deamons to get things working again (like when it stopped showing me the media report information). Talking with some people here at the LISA show, they feel the same way. That BackEx is not as stable as something like Veritas or Legato's products.
-- Jeff Bryer bryer@sfu.ca Systems Administrator (604) 291-4935 Academic Computing, Simon Fraser University
Jeff,
We too have been evaluating and using Backup Express and have been very happy with it and the support received from Syncsort. They are one of the only ones that have a functional NDMP backup product that met our needs. The other companies like Veritas and Legato failed with either lack of support for robot capabilities or other technical reasons. As for restarting the GUI or daemons, we have not experienced this. Not to say we haven't experienced problems, but any problem we have encountered has been quickly answered by one of their support tech's. If they can't answer it they will get back to us usually within an hour.
Bob Souder souder@super.org IDA - Center for Computing Sciences (CCS) (301) 805-7371
They are one of the only ones that have a functional NDMP backup product that met our needs.
But they are still not able to dump NDMP requests over the wire to a remote library.
-- ** Juan Torres ** UNIX Systems Administrator
On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, Robert Souder wrote:
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 10:41:17 -0500 From: Robert Souder souder@super.org To: toasters@mathworks.com Cc: joe.luchtenberg@data-line.com, bryer@sfu.ca Subject: Re:SYNCSORT BACKUP EXPRESS
Anybody out there in Toasterland using SyncSort Backup Express? Would appreciate any first-hand insight -- I have a customer asking me to price it out for him, and I'd like to know how it stacks up vs. other products I know better (Veritas, Legato, CommVault, Workstation Solutions, etc.). TIA. Joe
I've been evaluating Backup Express for a little while now. Along with Time Navigator (maybe Veritas soon). We eliminated all the others for one reason or another.
There are alot of thing in BackEx I like (as compared to Tina) but there are two big problems that we've found with it. The tape duplication process tries to make an exact copy of the tape. For Vault copies this can be a concern if you dest tape is a bit shorter than the original. The data will just fall off the end of the tape. Plus the software feels somewhat on the flaky side. I'm finding a variety of things that should work but don't, plus having to restart the GUI or the deamons to get things working again (like when it stopped showing me the media report information). Talking with some people here at the LISA show, they feel the same way. That BackEx is not as stable as something like Veritas or Legato's products.
-- Jeff Bryer bryer@sfu.ca Systems Administrator (604) 291-4935 Academic Computing, Simon Fraser University
Jeff,
We too have been evaluating and using Backup Express and have been very happy with it and the support received from Syncsort. They are one of the only ones that have a functional NDMP backup product that met our needs. The other companies like Veritas and Legato failed with either lack of support for robot capabilities or other technical reasons. As for restarting the GUI or daemons, we have not experienced this. Not to say we haven't experienced problems, but any problem we have encountered has been quickly answered by one of their support tech's. If they can't answer it they will get back to us usually within an hour.
Bob Souder souder@super.org IDA - Center for Computing Sciences (CCS) (301) 805-7371
They are one of the only ones that have a functional NDMP backup product that met our needs.
But they are still not able to dump NDMP requests over the wire to a remote library.
In regards to filer backups, Backup Express supports: --local filer backups [filer to locally attached tape library]; --three-way backups [filer to filer out to a tape library]; --filer to server backups [filer to tape library connected to a Solaris server]; --file history; --Direct Access Restore (DAR) (ONTAP6)
Regards, --Louis Pauls (lpauls@syncsort.com) Syncsort Inc (www.syncsort.com).
On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, Louis Pauls wrote:
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 16:02:04 -0500 From: Louis Pauls lpauls@syncsort.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: SYNCSORT BACKUP EXPRESS
They are one of the only ones that have a functional NDMP backup product that met our needs.
But they are still not able to dump NDMP requests over the wire to a remote library.
In regards to filer backups, Backup Express supports: --local filer backups [filer to locally attached tape library]; --three-way backups [filer to filer out to a tape library];
--filer to server backups [filer to tape library connected to a Solaris server];
maybe using ufsdump, but not ndmp. that's where the problem lies.
--file history; --Direct Access Restore (DAR) (ONTAP6)
Regards, --Louis Pauls (lpauls@syncsort.com) Syncsort Inc (www.syncsort.com).
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Juan Torres -
Louis Pauls -
Robert Souder