We're just in the process of rolling out Netvault, so I don't have extensive experience with it but overall I like a lot.

We're running version 6.0.1 here, and have to admit, the interface sucks. It's copied from the NT version, and has a very NT way of doing things. I'm sure if that's what your used to, then it's O.K, but for unix people, it can get frusterating. There is no command line interface, so if you want to setup lost of different backup jobs, then plan on putting a lot of miles on your mouse. I have similar complaints about logging - It logs in an 'event manager' style. Little support for logs outside of the GUI. I have ben told however that command line support is planed, and that 6.1 in fact has some of it alredy.

Despite the interface, NetVault does seem to work well. It's fairly intuitive (just slow to setup) so learing it is fairly simple. Once it's setup, it seems to work quite well, and is as fast as anything else we've tried. (Although we havn't tried using NDMP yet)

One feature it has that absolutely kicks (IMHO) is it's virtual library. We have our backup host connected to a whack of local disk. On the disks we have a virtual library. As fas as netvault is concerned, it looks, and acts just like a real tape library, except that its on disk, so we don't have the standard latency you have with tapes. Once the backup is on the local drives, Netvault automaticly copys everything over to tape. Right now we're using MammothII tapes, and can get all 4 drives going at ~15MB/sec each (Whee!!!) What that means is that if you want to expand your backup cluster, all you need to do is create a few more virtual drives. No need to have more then a couple real tape drives since they're no longer the bottle necks.

So far, the only problems I've had with NetVault is it's interface, but other then that, I really don't have anything bad to say about it. Once you get it setup it seems to run as advertized.

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Lichteveld, Edwin wrote:

Hello list,

As the last release of NetVault supports NDMP in order to backup a Network Appliance filer, I am very much interested in references wrt this product. Who is willing to share experiences and their configurations?

regards,

Edwin