This email was forwarded to me by an acquaintance, and I would like to give some feedback. First of all, I work for BakBone as the Northwest Regional Manager, and have been familiar with the NetVault product since 1995, when AT&T still owned the product. My last company, Andataco, was the original reseller of the product then, and since, the product has been acquired by BakBone, and world headquarters have been moved to San Diego, with other engineering and support facilities in Lanham, MD, England, and Japan.
6.03 gives you the command line interface capabilities that John Ross referred to. In 6.01, they were not available. With the product as modular as it is, we received numerous request for command line, and turned out the functionality within months. NDMP and NetApp support are also a feature set of 6.03, and the performance is quite spectacular there as well, as John found with the Exabyte M2 drives. We are seeing as much as 19MB/sec with a STK 9840 directly attached to a NetApp. It takes just minutes to hook up a NetApp box, and similar amount of time and effort to use Netvault to back up a SAN. We can dynamically shares drives between a NetApp and any other server or Client, UNIX, NT, or LINUX as well
More information is available at www.bakbone.com, or anyone can call me at 503-892-3933. I hope this is of value to you.
Thanks for your time,
Dale Sykes Northwest Regional Manager BakBone
From: John Ross Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 6:36 PM To: Lichteveld, Edwin Cc: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: Re: Dead or alive : References wanted for Netvault required
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
-- John Ross Systems Administrator AT&T Canada
Tact, n.: The unsaid part of what you're thinking.
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Dale Sykes