Veritas NetBackup 6.5

This is an Enterprise backup and recovery solution for large enterprises.

NetBackup provides disk based and tape based data protection through a single

administration console. It supports full as well as incremental backups with

scheduled backups for clients across the network. Administrators can define any

number of policies and even control whether users can configure their own

backups or not. It has some useful features like snapshots, archiving,

deduplication etc. For recovering data it comes with a feature called Bare Metal

Restore, in which during backup, the software also captures configuration and

current state of the machine. This happens every time a scheduled backup is

taken. So whenever the server crashes, it can restore the entire server with its

configuration settings. Another interesting feature present in Netbackup is

Access Management, in which you can define user groups and functions they can

perform.

NetBackup also provides comprehensive reports through its report utility

which can be useful in managing NetBackup operations. It comes with as many as

23 reports which includes Tape reports, Disk reports and Vault Reports.

NetBackup supports all popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix

etc.

Tests and Results



We tested Veritas NetBackup in a Windows environment for disk based backup

with a SAN. We installed the software on a Windows 2003 Server. The installation

was easy and so was getting started on it afterwards.

Its administration console at first looked a bit complex, but once we played

around with it, it became pretty easy to use. It has a simple Getting Started

Wizard through which the initial configuration can be done. The Wizard first

detects all external storage devices connected to the server (such as Tape

Drives) and helps users connect to a SAN client.

We managed to create a catalog and backup policy within minutes through this

wizard. These catalogs are internal databases of NetBackup which contain

information required to restore backups. It even asked to catalog the Disaster

recovery file related to backup and also emailed it, so that it could easily be

retrieved incase of a disaster.

The email contained all information about disaster recovery procedures,

catalog backup status information along with the disaster recovery file.

In case Backup destinations need to changed later, it can be easily done

through its Storage utility. NetBackup also allows users to configure Storage

Lifecycle Policies where it allows users to choose how long the backup images

should be retained.

With Veritas Netbakup you can create customized policies for every type backup and schdule them

Every time before starting a backup, NetBackup performs a Bare Metal restore backup of server's configuration

Once a backup has started you can view its details and all related activities

from the Activity Monitor window. Other then backup jobs it also shows services,

processes and drives involved in the backup process.

Through NetBackup's Activity Monitor Window, you can monitor all Current status of backup jobs, Processes and drives used

NetBackup client too was a breeze to install. The client also came with a MS

SQL Server Extension, which easily detected SQL database and its instances

present on the server. Through this extension itself it allowed us to backup SQL

database with the policy we created earlier. Its client also has a job tracker,

from which you can monitor the backups initiated from the client's end. The best

part about NetBackup client is that you do not need to install separate database

agents and users on client end can also initiate backups as well as restores.

With the same NetBackup client you can backup/restore desktops also.

NetBackup comes with an MS SQL Server extension, through which you can easily backup and restore the database

We then tested the server with full disk backup of another server running

Windows 2003 with 1GB RAM and Intel Xeon processor, having 30 GB of data present

over a 100 Mbps LAN, It took 1 hour and 16 seconds to backup the entire data.

After the backup had finished, when we checked the location where data was

getting backed up, we found the solution had created three .img files, out of

which one was a 30 GB file, which we presume contained all backed up data and

also present there were a bunch of .info files.

After that we deleted a few files from the master server and tried restoring

it. Interestingly if you want to restore a few files, it can only be done

through the NetBackup client. This cannot be done from NetBackup's

Administration Console. Veritas NetBackup client managed to restore the files

perfectly without much trouble.

Bottomline: Overall, if you are looking for a continuous data

protection solution, this one is a good choice. About the price Symantec told us

it doesn't have a fixed price and it largely depends upon the number of agents

that the customer is going to deploy.