We received a marketing mail from Veritas, hyping the beta for their "panther" product. The boss asked us if we wanted to take a look at it. So I checked it out.
Oy. My verdict? Pointless.
What it is, as distilled from the marketing
Salvage that integrates with your backup system, but for Windows. Since it hooks into the backup system, it has a higher capacity than the Salvage that has been with NetWare since the, oh NW2.1x days in the 80's.
First and foremost, it only works on files kept on Windows servers. Since all of our fileserving is done from NetWare, that means we can't use it for anything but keeping our developers happy, and the lone FrontPage/SharePoint server.
Second, even if it did support NetWare, it doesn't make a lot of sense. NetStorage in NW65SP3 has the ability to salvage files from the web, a key feature of Panther. Changing the low-water mark for when you add storage to your NSS pools is very probably more cost-effective than the Panther product would be. So instead of adding storage when free-space crosses the 15% line, add space when it crosses the 30% line. The extra expense is very probably cheaper than the Veritas product would be.
Oy. My verdict? Pointless.
What it is, as distilled from the marketing
Salvage that integrates with your backup system, but for Windows. Since it hooks into the backup system, it has a higher capacity than the Salvage that has been with NetWare since the, oh NW2.1x days in the 80's.
First and foremost, it only works on files kept on Windows servers. Since all of our fileserving is done from NetWare, that means we can't use it for anything but keeping our developers happy, and the lone FrontPage/SharePoint server.
Second, even if it did support NetWare, it doesn't make a lot of sense. NetStorage in NW65SP3 has the ability to salvage files from the web, a key feature of Panther. Changing the low-water mark for when you add storage to your NSS pools is very probably more cost-effective than the Panther product would be. So instead of adding storage when free-space crosses the 15% line, add space when it crosses the 30% line. The extra expense is very probably cheaper than the Veritas product would be.
We're getting away from tape-based backups altogether. We're even ditching Veritas BE 9.1.We've decided to go with a Dell PE 750 hooked to a Promise Vtrac 15100 array full of 400 GB SATA drives, running Rsync.