We're happily using Backup Exec 8.0 in our NT/2000 environments (and NetBackup for the filers). There are agents, some licensed separately, some included with BE, for specific applications. IE, there are agents for Exchange and SQL that work with the MS APIs to flush the logs and perform an online backup of the database. There are accelerator agents available for NT, 2000, 95/98 platforms that have two benefits. In the case of a differential or incremental backup, the agents scan the local drives to determine what files need to be backed up. The agent also compresses the data as it is sent over the network to the backup server. The agent typically improves performance by 30% on our 100Mbit switched network. There are agents for the Mac and some UNIX flavors included with the advanced edition. A Novell agent can be purchased as well. A new requirement with Backup Exec 8.x and Windows 2000 is that Windows 2000 systems being backed up remotely must have the Backup Exec Windows 2000 agent to fully protect the "system state". I think this means the new Windows 2000 specifics like AD.

There's no reason you couldn't use Backup Exec to backup a CIFS-enabled filer over the network. (You could probably even mount the NFS export on a UNIX server, and use the UNIX agent.) Backup Exec would treat the filer's UNC like any other NT share - if the Backup Exec account can access that share, it can back it up. Performance would be my big concern - Backup Exec doesn't stream or interleave jobs. Throughput over the network is typically 20-30GB/hour. You could run multiple jobs to multiple tape drives - i.e., backup vol1 to drive 1, vol2 to drive 2. I'm not sure how it would handle things like archive bits or UNIX style file permissions.

-warren

-----Original Message----- From: Patrick Lee [mailto:pat@patlee.org] Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 10:46 AM To: Benn, Paul Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Backup Exec on 760 NT filer

At 19:14 11/06/00, Benn, Paul wrote:

The latest versions of Veritas BackupExec (8.x) supposedly now

require that all

backup clients have a backup agent installed. You can't install an

agent on the

filer.

Not true. I am using Backup Exec (8.0) to backup my Filer and it works fine. Installing an agent on an NT server would allow the backup to go significantly faster, however. Backing up over 100 Mbps LAN:

Backup of Filer: 189 MB/minute Backup of Exchange server w/ agent: 332.7 MB/minute (local disks) Backup of SQL server w/ agent: 311.2 MB/minute (local disks)