Netbackup 6.5.4 vs arcserve 12.5

[puma95]

i have been assigned to an IT mission - i have been asked to prepare a comparison chart between arcserve 12.5 and netbackup 6.5.4 - yet i dont know were to start ... if anyone did something like that befor or maybe can direct me to any relevant links it would be appriciated please help

[Anonymous]

Arcserve as a product has mainly been a competitor to Backup Exec, not NetBackup.
NetBackup is a heterogenous enterprise level backup and recovery solution.

It might be worth you doing a comparison of those 2 products.
Of course it all depends on what you are backing up, and what OS.

Wikipedia could be a good start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software
Although there is no entry for Arcserve...interesting.

One strong thing to consider when making a choice is technical support. I found support for Arcserve in the days of NT 2000 when I was using it to be poor. Whereas, NetBackup support and community support was great. Likewise Backup Exec.

[sdo]

Hi puma95,

I've been using NetBackup for six years, and I thoroughly recommend it.  It scales so well, from a single small standalone local installation on a single business server - all the way up to thousands of clients.  It is very capable of growing with your business, and whenever you have a stragetic refresh you can nearly always retain/reuse your entire existing infrastructure.

Some initial questions:
1) Do you have your business requirements well defined?  Without this, you will be at sea no matter which product you look at.  This is an absolute minimum pre-cursor.
2) Do you have I.T. requirements?  e.g. RTOs (Recovery Time Objective) are usually fairly easy to define, and RPOs (Recovery Point Objective) for each system, but these are usually harder to define.
3) Is there anything already in place that can leveraged?
4) Or is this a green-field installation?
5) How much data do you expect to backup?  Daily, Weekly?
6) How long do you intend to retain your copies of data for?
6) How many servers do you expect to backup?
7) What is the mix of platforms and O/S variants/versions?  Any really old servers?
8) How many sites, buildings, plants, offices?
9) Is this part of a cohesive DR plan?
10) Do you have part of your budget reserved for professional services from a reseller - or at least one or more experienced contractors to help you get setup quickly?


IMHO, the questions above will help you determine which hardware you need, and then, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised that NetBackup more than likely supports any and all of it.


These pages will be most useful for you initially:

Symantec's overview of NetBackup:
http://www.symantec.com/business/products/newfeatures.jsp?pcid=2241&pvid=2_1

Sun's overview of NetBackup:
http://www.sun.com/storage/management_software/data_protection/veritas_netbackup/features.xml

The Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide for v6.5:
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/307083.pdf

The NetBackup support/docs/manuals etc front page:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/overview.jsp?pid=15143


These pages will be useful once you have decided to purchase:

The support case logging site:
https://mysupport.symantec.com/

The 45-day digest of issues:
http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/NBUESVR_digest.htm
(N.B. do not be put off by this.  This is probably one of the most useful sites, once you get set-up.  Symantec are very good indeed at keeping customers informed via this page/site).

The Licencing Portal:
https://licensing.symantec.com/acctmgmt/index.jsp


HTH,
Dave.

[sdo]

...and the master compatibility list:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/303344.htm
 

[puma95]

Thank you for your reply - there is a lot to go through as you suggest .

more than that i need to show in my chart what netbackup has that arcserve dont.

thanks again

Avis

[Trevor_Jackson1]

When selecting NetBackup over a number of other comparable products, it was quite difficult. And I will pose that it always will be difficult.

The selection criteria needs to match your customer base needs, but I think that selecting a product. I evaluated CommVault and a number of other Enterprise products, before selecting NetBackup, which seems to be the better of the few out there.

Typically as a Solution Architect I thought about the problems we needed to resolve. There were two options to make the Centralized Backup Service come alive.

1) Do Nothing! : which means many products, no centralization and no ability to expand to larger data centre models.

2) Centralize Backup and Restore, using Disk Based backups, Centralize Administration and Reporting (Backup Reporter selected here) for those backups that cannot be unable to view their archived backups (for DR purposes).

So basically I wrote a paper explaining the risks of not upgrading to NetBackup and potential costs of not upgrading, put that in a table that shows the costs of upgrading and massage until option 2 is less than option 1. With Centralization you reduce TCO and increase ability to sell Backup and Restore as a service. A much needed $ sign in the managements eye I feel.

Have fun with the evaluation, as someone who worked with ArcServe products since Netware 3 came out, I must say that we have had as many calls in a year to support for NetBackup as we did in a week, and sometimes a day for Arcserve. Figures speak for themselves.

Trevor