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** SUMMARY ** Best Backup Product for Distributed Systems

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Jonathan Bines

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Feb 8, 1994, 1:37:18 AM2/8/94
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SUMMARY: BEST BACKUP PRODUCT FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS ENVIRONMENTS

What follows is a collection of responses, very lightly edited, to
a request I posted a couple of weeks ago for information on the best
backup products for distributed systems. The results will be used as part
of the research for an in-depth analysis to be published in the March
issue of the Network and Systems Managers' Best Practices Report.
Information on the Best Practices Report can be found at the end of this
post.

The report will be focusing on what we refer to as "enterprise"
backup solutions, differentiated from "domain" solutions. The distinction
is somewhat artificial--most vendors claim that their backup products are
scalable to whatever your needs may happen to be. However, it has become
clear in the course of our interview process that certain products do not
offer the functionality to be considered true enterprise solutions. These
include BudTools from Delta Microsystems, Alexandria from Cheyenne
(although the company is working hard to move the product into the UNIX
world), Software Moguls, and a number of other products.

In general, products migrating up from the Novell environment to
heterogeneous environments tend to offer less robust functionality than
products which started out on UNIX or were engineered from the ground up
for multiplatform environments. Legato is a clear exception to this rule,
and is considered by many to be the current leader in backing up
heterogeneous environments.

Differentiating backup products by functionality is problematic,
beasue, of 100 possible functions a backup/storage management solution
could provide, each vendor will promise you at least 90 or so. Thus, the
key differentiators are not so much in the area of diversity of functions,
but how well the solution scales, what kind of support you get for it, and
whether the damn thing works. And these distributed backup solutions are
still in their infancy, technology-wise. They are far from bug free,
plug-and-play apps.

As a result, a very intensive evaluation period is highly recommended by
almost all vendors and users prior to purchase. One vendor even suggested
simulating crises for the purposes of testing out a vendor's support
services (on the other hand, if the reliability of these products is as
poor as we've been hearing, you probably won't have to wrack your brain
trying to come up with a simulated crisis...)

Currently, the major players in the market for enterprise
backup/storage management solutions are Legato, Epoch, and IBM Adstar.
However, this is far from an exhaustive list. I just got some literature
on a product from AT&T called CommVault which looks _extremely_ promising.
Open Vision has a backup product which is also looking like it could be a
contender. Computer Associates offers backup as part of its integrated
suite of apps, allowing integration with other sys mgmt apps such as
workflow, security, trouble- ticket (at the expense of depth of
functionality, some say...) These products are too new to really evaluate
at this time. If you're running a fairly homogeneous Sun shop, Sun's
Backup Copilot is worth a look. HP offers OmniBack and OmniBack Turbo,
which claim to support heterogeneous environments but tend to be found
predominantly in HP shops. I have yet to hear anything good about these
products. There are many other products out there with small installed
bases which I've not covered (feel free to write me with info on any you
consider important).

Here are a few quick impressions of different products I've
gleaned from my own interview process. I'd love to get more comments from
anyone who has experience with these products. Mail to jonb...@panix.com

Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform
support, single GUI across multiple platforms.
Epoch: Tight integration with HSM product, multiplatform support
IBM ADSM: Current version requires MVS as server; multiplatform support,
integration with HSM
CA Unicenter: Integration w/other sys mgmt apps;"mainframe-like" feel
to interface
Delta Microsystems BudTool: Primarily a GUI for standard UNIX tools, with
some added functionality.
Sun Backup CoPilot: Primarily for Sun-only shops
HP OmniBack & OmniBack Turbo: Difficult to use, used primarily in HP shops

And now, without further ado, here's what the Internet had to say
(references to people and companies have been removed. If you're
desperate to contact one of the respondents, send me mail and I'll pass
your request along.)

FREEWARE:

"Without a doubt the best backup scheme we've found is Amanda from the
University of Maryland (cs.umd.edu).

Amanda supports all the major platforms, has excellent support directly
from the authors (with response time better than you typically get for
even an acknowledgement of your question from vendors), and best of all
it is free so you can a apply it to all the machines on your network
without an outrageous site license fee. Of course since you have
source you can incorporate your own changes like making 2 copies of
your backups at once (for offsite storage), creating Tables Of Contents
of whats is on each tape, and such (these examples come from actual
users on the amanda-users mailing list).

Amanda works very well with jukeboxes, although you typically have to
write those scripts yourself. Future versions of amanda will support
DOS clients.

We've used amanda for over a year and have nothing but good things to say."

**********

"Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many
computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This release
is currently in daily use at the University of Maryland @ College Park
Computer Science Department, backing up all the disks on all the
workstations in the department: currently over 28 gigabytes of data across
321 filesystems on more than 128 workstations, using a single 5 Gigabyte
Exabyte EXB-8500. Here are some features of Amanda:

* written in C, freely distributable.
* built on top of standard backup software: BSD Unix dump/restore, and
later GNU Tar and others.
* will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to
tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
* does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
* for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
backup image on the tape for you.
* recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
* reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
* will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no
more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
* can compress dumps before sending over net.
* can optionally syncronize with external backups, for those large
timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
* lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.

There is still a lot of work to do on Amanda 2, particularly in the areas
of user documentation, portability, and improvement of protocols and
algorithms."


**********

IBM ADSTAR:


"We are currently using IBM/ADSTAR's ADSM product and its BetaTest earlier
version WDSF. The database and control runs on a 3090, the data itself it
sent to a two tower STK silo. We have about a terabyte of disk spinning
an dthe silo will have over 4TB of space when all the tapes haev been
cycled to the new longer format.

On paper, this is the most comprehensive, easy to use and complete on-line
backup system on the planet. We have looked at the others and,
feature-for-feature, it can't be beat.

Alas, it doesn't work all that well.

For backing up and retireving a small number of objects, it is superb. The
problem comes when the number of objects - files, links, directories and
versions of those increases. We currently have at least 10 million such
objects and are keeping about 3 versions of each.

The proprietary database used to manage these objects is the primary problem.
It spans several disks and is mirrored for (some) safety. Mirroring did
not help the multiple corruption problems we encountered a year ago and all the
information about the silos was lost. Lots of scratch tapes.


ADSM is the latest released version. It was supposed to be more reliable and
answer the criticism that restores of large data sets - disks, partitions -
could take nearly forever due to tape activity. ADSM does this by actively
compacting current tapes - an operation that consumes free tapes drives
for most of the day. In addition, the improvements to its database have
resulted in even more frequent crashes. We are assured that IBM is
commited to making it work. We are not quite sure they can.

Our local systems programmer insists that it is our fault - the Unix community -
for wishing to back evrything up all the time. Having a multi-million dollar
backup system that has to be pampered leaves us quite unimpressed. We are
committed to doing standard Unix dumps in parallel and are about to try to
automate that. We don't think any single backup system is reliable enough
to handle the amount of data we have.

Features to look for include: The ability to remove tapes from the Silo and
archive them; compaction of active data to keep it colocated on fewer volumes;
the associated ability to squeeze out obsolete data objects; In fact, backups
fone an the object (file) level versus whole dataset backup is one big feature
to look for - many products just do a clever Unix dump as opposed to file-
by-file backup.

And again - paper features versus acutal operation is an important thing to
know."

**********

I've studied (but not tried) IBM's ADSM. It has some technical
problems:

* not NFS aware
* no raw partition backup
* backup tapes do not carry catalog information, so the
catalog database needs to be backed up separately (you need
a ``backup for the backup''). But since there is no redo
log for the catalog database, you lose badly if you have a
disaster on your backup server: you cannot replay the
changes that took place between the last catalog backup and
the server disaster.

EPOCH

If the HSM part had been successful we
would have been using Epoch Backup by now, but the machine has
suffered from so many problems that we do not want to trust it with
our backups. One thing I would say is that I do not like backup
systems that require special software to be used for restore: in a
disaster-recovery situation you might be stuck for days waiting for
the software to be ready before you could start recovering data.
Dont install HSM until you really understand the applications that
will use it (and the file-access patterns that these will generate...)


BUDTOOL:


We have been using BudTool for the past 1 1/2 years to backup all
our servers. It has been very easy to manage and maintain current
backups.

Some of the reasons we chose BudTool are:

It does NOT use a pripority tape format. The tapes can be read using
standard Unix utilities. Even if the BudTool application is not
available for any reason, the tapes can still be read.

It operates on any Unix system

Only the Media server must be licensed, instead of the server and all
clients.

BudTool gives the option of using dump, tar, cpio or writing your own
application for backups.

Our Environment:

I have Budtool with the 10I jukebox installed on a SLC. This system is
used as a workstation during the day and runs backups at night.

Budtool keeps three different histories, media, request, and file. The file
histories get rather large during the month. Normally I keep the current
history files in BudTool's history directory, then move them to the temphist
directory at the end of the month and create new history files. The restore
functions allow using either history or temphist for restore. A single file
needed from a backup longer than two or three months can be restored by
looking at the request file to determine the partition location on the tape,
manually load the tape, forward to the appropriate location, then run restore
manually. This occurs at our site maybe twice a year.

The restore function also allow for returning files to their original location,
a new location, or a staging directory.

Access is fast enough that from one Budtool media server, I backup 12 servers
with a nightly incremental level 5 dump and full level 0 dumps over Saturday and
Sunday. No operatoris required.

The only problems we have encountered have been hardware -- the exabyte drive
decided not to write on the tapes and jambed one tape in the drive. Support from
Delta Micro has been responsive and the technical support people helpful.

LEGATO:

We have been using DEC's "Network Save and Restore"
for some time. This is a rebadged Legato Networker, with apparently very
few changes from the original product apart from minor cosmetic fiddling.

The product's core functionality is fine - it is easy to set up clients,
and restoring a crashed system to its previous state is now much easier
(in fact, the filesystem recovery is the easiest part, while re-installing
the OS is still far too time-consuming). Recovery of individual files is
also easy, especially as it is the user who drives the recovery process,
eliminating transcription errors. It is also very fast.

The problems we have had with DECnsr have mostly been the sort of annoying
bugs and difficulties you find with any new product. Certain things are
badly documented, or you have to do things in what seems a perverse way.

To take an example: in order to recycle a backup tape, you have to re-label
it. Even if all the save sets it previously contained have expired, the
space they take up on the tape will not be re-used unless the tape is
explicitly re-labelled. This is not documented anywhere, and it took several
weeks for Digital Support to work out what we were "doing wrong".

However, the core functionality is fine and I am sure the minor problems
will be cleared up. Overall, we are quite pleased with the product.

We use a DECStation 5000/240 with two DAT drives - for backing up about 30
UNIX machines, a mix of Suns, Irises, and ULTRIX DECStations. Total backup
volume is about 50 Gbytes.


A COMPARISON OF MANY PRODUCTS:

A couple of years ago we finally decided we had to ditch our old
decrepit methods of system backups and move to something more
reasonable. We looked in-depth at EpochBackup, Backup Copilot, Delta
Budtool. We were going to test Legato's Networker, but didn't
(although now I can't remember why).

In brief:

- Delta's BudTool: a dud. (Perhaps later versions have improved.)
We objected to the need to install their own scsi driver on our
systems and the need to use their tape drives, which were lousy.

- Epoch's EpochBackup: We were actually one of the beta-test sites.
Our objections were: all backups run to the Epoch, so you have one
very large single-point-of-failure. Backups were written in some
goofy proprietary format so you had to use the epoch to run a restore;
Epoch had plans to produce a utility so you could read their tapes on
a Sun, for example, but at that point such a utility was vaporware.
We were having many problems with our epochs at the time of our
testing, so shifting a critical application to the Epoch at the time
did not seem very wise.

- Backup Copilot: this is what we use now. The software was
relatively easy to configure and it runs reliably. Drawbacks are that
we can only use it on Suns, but since we are 99.99% a sun shop, this
doesn't hurt us right now. Also there are a couple of bugs that I'd
like to see fixed, for example, it would be nice if dump as invoked by
dumpex (the dump scheduler/executor) did not default to online mode;
dump itself has a force-offline-mode option, but there's no way to
tell dumpex to use that option. The database is incredibly large and
should be optional. We've opted to ditch the database in favor of
just keeping detailed logfiles handy, which is just as well
considering the database is broken due to some parts of copilot not
handling fully-qualified hostnames correctly (and the distributed
patch caused more problems than it solved). Despite these problems
we're happy with the software and are hopeful that a future release
will fix some of the outstanding problems.


ALEXANDRIA:

We're running a couple of large Series 6 Solbourne's (21 gig. of disk each) plus an
HP 755 (10 gig. of disk). Solbourne had flagged Alexandria as their backup system of
choice, which we began testing. We had some hardware failures with our equipment and
Solbourne has since stated that they have stopped recommending this backup solution
because of reliability problems.

The Alexandria software wrote to a 8mm juke box and although I believe 8mm to be
the best trade off between access time, price and size of backup I would certainly
like to hear comments on any other media you might be using. The Alexandria system was $30k+ so money
is not much of an
object - reliability and versatility are. Of course it would be nice if the software
was friendly.


BACKING UP THE RELATIONAL DATABASE:


>I'm reading over some really slick material on Epoch's RDBMS backup.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Has anyone used this yet?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Epoch Systems entered into a development agreement with DataTools to develop
an interface module between EpochBackup (their file system backup and recovery
product) and DataTools' SQL-BackTrack for Sybase (our database-aware backup
and recovery for Sybase databases). The SQL-BackTrack EpochBackup Module will
allow customers to centralize the backup and recovery of file systems (via
EpochBackup) and Sybase databases (via SQL-BackTrack for Sybase).

The SQL-BackTrack EpochBackup Module simply passes the Sybase backup stream
from SQL-BackTrack for Sybase to EpochBackup to handle media management,
stacker/jukebox support (e.g. - Exabytes, HP Opticals or StorageTek Silos),
and to central the backup and recovery of the entire enterprise's data (file
systems and database).

The SQL-BackTrack EpochBackup Module is currently in beta, soyou won't be
able to currently get any commercial references. The Sybase backup
functionality that it will provide is what SQL-BackTrack for Sybase has done
for close to a year at over 200 sites to date.

If so, what platform?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Development was first on Sun SPARC platforms, with HP and RS/6000 being ported.


How was the data stored? How did you find the logical backup operation?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

SQL-BackTrack stores data either in a physical or logical format. Physical
dumps accept the data stream from the 'dump database' or 'dump transaction'
stream and append an object level header, allowing the extraction of a
particular object (table, stored procedure, trigger, view, userid, etc.).
SQL-BackTrack also allows true incremental backups, compression and encryption
for physical format dumps.

Logical backups are an object-by-object backup of the entire Sybase database,
or of just selected objects (such as tables with 'RI'). It is a hardware
(server and disk type) and software (O/S and Sybase version) independent
format. This allows archiving, data migration, copying of tables directly
between databases, reloading of a datbase into a smaller partition, etc.

Netters can give you their feedback on their opinion of its functionality!


>They also support Client/Server backups which we are evaluating.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Our remote backup support, even on SybaseV4.0.1 through 4.9.2 EBF, makes it
easy to tailor into network-wide backups via Epoch.


********

OTHER:

This isn't *quite* backup, but we have do have a feature called
"Snapshots" in our NFS file server that work in combination with
regular backup utilities. A snapshot is a complete on-line copy of a
file system that users can access over NFS to recover files they have
accidentally deleted. Since a snapshots is a read-only copy of the
file system that doesn't change even if the active file system does
change, system administrators can do safe backups from a snapshot even
if the system is active.


ABOUT THE BEST PRACTICES REPORT:


Thanks for your interest in the Network and Systems Managers' Best
Practices Report. Here's a brief overview to give you an idea of the
newsletter. For more complete information or to subscribe, please mail me
your snail-mail address and I'll send you off a brochure (the newsletter
will not be available over the net, although we will post summaries of all
research we do on the net, and will occasionally post articles before
publication for comment).


The Best Practices Report (BPR) is the newsletter for top-level
managers of distributed networks and systems. BPR's charter is to capture
the experiences of pioneering users and make that knowledge available to
companies, government agencies, and universities attempting to implement
distributed, networked, and client/server computing. The newsletter
provides CIOs, project managers, and other IS managers with a wealth of
information on all aspects of managing distributed systems, including:

- Metrics and Benchmarks which Define Best Practices
- Profiles of Pioneering Users
- Focus on Problem Areas in Sys/Net Management (Security, Backup, etc)
- Staff Management Issues
- Cost-Justifying IS Budgets
- Comparative Analyses of Management Platforms and Applications
- Best-Of-Breed Product Selections
- Coverage of Major Conferences (ComNet, UniForum, ComDex, etc.)
- Other Fun Stuff.

BPR covers management issues at a fairly high level--it's not a
technical newsletter (After all, the tech community already has a terrific
best practices group: it's called the Internet). So if you're a SysAdmin,
I'd appreciate it if you'd pass word along to your boss/es. In return,
we'll try to include a few articles about why they should be paying you
more.

Subscription information will be included with the brochure. Of
course, please feel free to send any queries/information/leads to me at
jonb...@panix.com. I'd be especially interested in hearing from
organizations that are implementing leading-edge management solutions for
their distributed systems--if you are from such an organization, or can
direct me to one, I'd be grateful. Also, I'd like to hear about products
you are using which have been particularly valuable or successful.


--
Jon Bines (jonb...@panix.com) ^ "I don't want to achieve immortality ^
NSM Best Practices Rept. ^ through my work, I want to achieve it ^
203 1st Ave #1 NY NY 10003 ^ through not dying." ^
Phone/Fax 212-254-7064 ^ -W. Allen ^

Anthony A. Datri

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Feb 8, 1994, 6:55:25 PM2/8/94
to
>Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform
>support, single GUI across multiple platforms.

HUGE databases. The graphical interface is *suntools*.

>Epoch: Tight integration with HSM product, multiplatform support

Very difficult to install and interact with. They actually put a wrapper
around the SCSI driver, and thus will only work with a small set of SCSI
host adapters and tape drives.

Amanda has my vote.

--

======================================================================8--<

Jonathan Bines

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Feb 9, 1994, 8:28:00 PM2/9/94
to

ADDENDUM/ERRATUM:

Readers of the Summary have pointed out a couple of errors which bear
correction:

1) Legato's product comes from the UNIX world. The company spent
significant time and effort engineering its product to support the Novell
environment

2) Alexandria is not Cheyenne's product. It is from:

Spectra Logic
1700 North 55th Street
Boulder, CO
Phone: (303) 449-6400

This product also hails from UNIX land.

Other notes:

We included IBM's ADSM, and not other products running on MVS such as
Harbor's backup product, because IBM has recently announced RS/6000 and
OS/2 versions of the product.

Also, Legent has a backup product called ESM which claims to have all the
functionality of a true enterprise solution. Any info on this product
would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, another user comment:

I think you should consider a product pair called Hiback/Hibars from:
HiComp America, Inc.
419 Canyon Ave., Suite 215
Ft. Collins, CO 80521-2670
Phone: (303) 224-9700

We are using this product to do network backups of ~50 UNIX servers.
It has proven to be reliable. Supports UNIX, DOS, and MPE network or
standalone backup.

It is not feature-laden, nor does it have an impressive GUI, but as I said,
it has been reliable, it is fast, and takes very little system resources
to run. Check it out!

Harper Mann

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Feb 9, 1994, 8:52:53 PM2/9/94
to
In article <CKxJs...@dvorak.amd.com> a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes:

>Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform
>support, single GUI across multiple platforms.

HUGE databases. The graphical interface is *suntools*.

Well, it was suntools originally but we have supported Xview, Motif,
Curses and command line for several years. Your info is pretty out of date.

As far as space for index databases, how do you allow your users to see what
files they can recover? Legato Networker can be configured to release db
entries according to browse and retention policies that tune the size of the
db. It's up to the Admin.

Does Amanda allow end users to browse their files? If they do, do you see
much smaller db's given similar policies?

Amanda has my vote.

Say more about Amanda and what is does that you like.

--

- Harper
--
------------------------------------------
| Harper Mann | Legato Systems, Inc. |
| har...@legato.com | 3145 Porter Drive. |
| 415-812-6071 | Palo Alto, CA. 94304 |
------------------------------------------

Ulrich Mack

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Feb 11, 1994, 2:51:41 AM2/11/94
to
a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes:

>>Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform
>>support, single GUI across multiple platforms.

>HUGE databases. The graphical interface is *suntools*.

>>Epoch: Tight integration with HSM product, multiplatform support

>Very difficult to install and interact with. They actually put a wrapper
>around the SCSI driver, and thus will only work with a small set of SCSI
>host adapters and tape drives.

True, they only support 3480, Exabyte and DAT tape drives, and backup to MO or
WORM cartridges.. I guess thats pretty limiting. With regard to multiplatform
support, the server is at present a Sun, but the clients cover a reasonably
wide spectrum of Unix systems and Novell. As far as difficult to install, it
may be a case of familiarity breeds contempt, but I DON'T find EpochBackup
difficult to install or configure.

Comparing Legato to Epoch is fair only if you look at the two products at
a similar level of hardware configuration and functionality. Once you do
that it becomes very clear that Legato is a very good low-end product, with
an excellent user interface. Epoch's product has a rather more basic
administration interface but its functionality blows Legato out of the
water. EpochBackup 2.X actually provides a reasonable admin GUI and should
be considered for any serious backup services.

Ulrich Mack
--
Email: ri...@cxbne.cx.oz.au ,-_|\
Phone: +61 7 252 3788 / *
Fax: +61 7 257 1480 \_,-._/ Comperex Australia Pty Ltd
v

--

Ulrich Mack
--
Email: ri...@cxbne.cx.oz.au ,-_|\

Leslie Mikesell

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Feb 13, 1994, 8:27:40 PM2/13/94
to
In article <CKxJs...@dvorak.amd.com>,
Anthony A. Datri <a...@dvorak.amd.com> wrote:

>Amanda has my vote.

I think Amanda is pretty BSD dependent but it supports tape jukeboxes.
Ohio State University has a similar free backup system consisting of
perl scripts to maintain databases of tapes and filesystems, using
either dump or gnutar to perform the actual backups. It will work
on different machine types but all hosts involved in the system
need to mount a common NFS directory for the database and perl
has to be compiled with the Berkeley DB routines if you have byte
order differences among the machines. Again, the price is right.

Les Mikesell
l...@chinet.com

Pierre Didierjean

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Feb 14, 1994, 2:35:11 AM2/14/94
to

--

Hello !!!

I use another backup system, from RAXCO : BACKUP UNET

It works on Ultrix (i apply a lot of patches) and SunOS 4.x.x (more patches)

where can i found the last version of AMANDA ???

Thanks

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pierre DIDIERJEAN |
| |
| Administrateur Systeme UNIX |
| Cisi, Aix-en-Provence |
| France |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| email : cis...@albert.cad.cea.fr |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Randy Marchany

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Feb 14, 1994, 11:07:16 AM2/14/94
to
In article <CKxJs...@dvorak.amd.com> a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
>>Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform
>>support, single GUI across multiple platforms.
>>Epoch: Tight integration with HSM product, multiplatform support
>Amanda has my vote.

The problem with most of the network backup systems that I have seen
is that they use .rhosts to verify system identity. This is NOT secure!
Any backup system that uses this type of authentication can be spoofed
either at the server level or the client level. There are some products
that don't use this mechanism (Raxco, Dallastone and others) but they
may not have some of the nicer features.

Anyway, my point is that any backup package that uses .rhosts as the
means of verifying system identity is NOT secure.

-Randy Marchany
VA Tech Computing Center
Blacksburg, VA 24060

INTERNET: randy.m...@vt.edu

Dave Skinner

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Feb 14, 1994, 1:00:09 PM2/14/94
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Ulrich Mack (ri...@cxbne.cx.OZ.AU) wrote:

: True, they only support 3480, Exabyte and DAT tape drives, and backup to MO or


: WORM cartridges.. I guess thats pretty limiting. With regard to multiplatform
: support, the server is at present a Sun, but the clients cover a reasonably
: wide spectrum of Unix systems and Novell. As far as difficult to install, it
: may be a case of familiarity breeds contempt, but I DON'T find EpochBackup
: difficult to install or configure.

The StorageTek version of EpochBackup/EpochServ (called "NearNet") supports
all of the above plus 3480/3490 tape via small/large STK libraries. It also
works with these libraries standalone, with other library clients (e.g., Cray,
UniTree) as well as with MVS.

Performance is reasonably good, given the SPARC10 processor and 3 MB/sec
tape drives.

Cheers,


Dave Skinner

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Open Systems Architecture (OSA) |
| |
| Storage Technology Corp. Voice: (303) 673-7080 |
| 2270 South 88th Street, MS-5232 FAX: (303) 673-6837 |
| Louisville, CO 80028-5232 Internet: Dave_S...@stortek.com |
| STK EMC2: SKINNER.D |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

James da Silva

unread,
Feb 14, 1994, 6:04:41 PM2/14/94
to
a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
>Amanda has my vote.

Randy Marchany <marc...@vtserf.cc.vt.edu> replied:


>The problem with most of the network backup systems that I have seen
>is that they use .rhosts to verify system identity. This is NOT secure!
>Any backup system that uses this type of authentication can be spoofed
>either at the server level or the client level.

[...]


>Anyway, my point is that any backup package that uses .rhosts as the
>means of verifying system identity is NOT secure.

FYI, The next release of Amanda will support Kerberos V4 authentication,
including mutual authentication checks and optionally sending backups over
the net encrypted with the session key (for backing up those partitions
with the keys on them).

This Kerberos support is already implemented and running at a couple test
locations. People interested in trying out the test version should e-mail
me.

Jaime
............................................................................
: Stand on my shoulders, : j...@cs.umd.edu : James da Silva
: not on my toes. : uunet!mimsy!jds : Systems Design & Analysis Group

Markus Lamminmaki

unread,
Feb 15, 1994, 3:01:39 AM2/15/94
to
Jonathan Bines (jonb...@panix.com) wrote:

: SUMMARY: BEST BACKUP PRODUCT FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS ENVIRONMENTS

Has anyone been using Intels StorageExpress system? I have seen a demo
program for the system and it looked atleast nice...but has anyone
actually used it? I would be interested to hear from you.

--
Markus

Reinhard Mersch

unread,
Feb 15, 1994, 10:49:29 AM2/15/94
to
What about Hypertape? The things I know about it look quite interesting.
Any practical experience with this product?

--
Reinhard Mersch Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet
Universitaetsrechenzentrum, Einsteinstrasse 60, 48149 Muenster, Germany
E-Mail: mer...@uni-muenster.de Phone: +49(251)83-2488

Dominique Blas

unread,
Feb 20, 1994, 9:01:47 PM2/20/94
to

Could someone infor mus about HyperTape (How it works, on which Os it runs and
which OS it accepts to archive data from (Unix, NOVELL NetWare, DOS, ...)
its cost according to the configuration, ...) ?

Same Question about Legent products.

Same questions about LANRES/MVS from IBM.

Same questions about any other products you're using in order to archive
or keep you data safe from any OS.


Thanks.


db

--
Dominique Blas db...@genos.frmug.fr.net

Anthony Datri

unread,
Feb 21, 1994, 3:04:31 AM2/21/94
to
>where can i found the last version of AMANDA ???

cs.columbia.edu

--

======================================================================8--<

Angela Bao

unread,
Feb 23, 1994, 8:00:47 PM2/23/94
to
: >>Legato: Strengths include backing up data on the desktop, multiplatform

: >>support, single GUI across multiple platforms.
: >>Epoch: Tight integration with HSM product, multiplatform support
: >Amanda has my vote.

Would someone please e-mail or repost the original summary to this thread?
I missed the original post and our link to the archive sites are down.

Thank you!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Angela Bao -- Hughes Aircraft, CA | #include <std.disclaimer>
ang...@bssv01.hac.com |
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Jesse K. Chen

unread,
Feb 24, 1994, 9:22:42 PM2/24/94
to

I can't find the original posting about Best Backup Product. Could someone send
me a copy or tell me where can I find the archive?

BTW, IBM has a product called ADSM (Advanced/ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager).
It supports MVS, VM, OS/2 and AIX servers. The clients it support including
HP/UX, DOS, SUN, OS/2, AIX, DEC Ultrix, NetWare, ...
ADSM supports various communication protocols too.

I am not marketing rep. So, if you need more information, please contact IBM
directly.

Jesse
--
Design and Test Systems | VNET: JKCHEN at TUCSON
| Internet: je...@vnet.ibm.com
IBM Corp., Storage Systems Division | IBM IPNET: je...@jesse.tucson.ibm.com
Tucson, Arizona | Tel: (602) 799-2994, Tie Line 321

Kenneth Ng

unread,
Mar 1, 1994, 8:52:52 PM3/1/94
to
In article<CLKEF...@dvorak.amd.com: a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony Datri) writes:
:>where can i found the last version of AMANDA ???
:cs.columbia.edu

Um, could you name the directory? I've looked around for it and can't find it.

--
Kenneth Ng
Please reply to k...@helios.njit.edu for now.
"He only hit him once with a brick, so it can't be attempted murder"
Nightline: on the Richard Denning trial

Mike Stok

unread,
Mar 3, 1994, 10:07:43 AM3/3/94
to
In article <1994Mar2....@sugra.uucp>, Kenneth Ng <k...@sugra.uucp> wrote:
>In article<CLKEF...@dvorak.amd.com: a...@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony Datri) writes:
>:>where can i found the last version of AMANDA ???
>:cs.columbia.edu
>
>Um, could you name the directory? I've looked around for it and can't find it.

Try cs.umd.edu:/pub/amanda/amanda-2.1.1.tar.gz, I think that it's the
latest version...

Mike

--
The "usual disclaimers" apply. | Meiko
Mike Stok | 130C Baker Ave. Ext
Mike...@meiko.concord.ma.us | Concord, MA 01742
Meiko tel: (508) 371 0088 |

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