InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

October 30, 2000

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Veritas Offering Promises Faster Backup And Recovery

Apps remove server from Backup Equation and speed real-time processing

By Martin J. Garvey

More on storage:

TechWeb: IBM offers storage on demand (10/26/00) InternetWeek: HP adds EMC's hot backup (10/23/00) InternetWeek: Cybersettle settles on SANs (10/16/00)

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sers don't care about backup processes--they just want their information restored quickly after an outage. "When you're under the gun recovering Oracle, you really don't want to use manual methods," says John Maxwell, senior product manager of Veritas Software Corp. A delay of a couple of days, he adds, can be a career-ending move.

To help IT managers avoid making such a mistake, the vendor unveiled Veritas NetBackup 4.0V backup-and-recovery software last week. Thanks to snapshot activity, NetBackup now has ServerFree Agent, which uses the SCSI Extended Copy Command to let customers back up data from disk storage to tape with limited involvement from database or application servers. Veritas will also use the Storage Networking Industry Association's Third Party Copy data-movement API to let storage area network components contain the data-movement intelligence, thus eliminating server activity from the backup process.

The capabilities are designed to save customers time and free up their servers to focus on real-time data processing. NetBackup 4.0V and the ServerFree Agent will be available in January. NetBackup 4.0V will be priced at $5,000 to $27,000. ServerFree Agent will be priced at $9,000 per server; an Oracle version will range from $9,000 to $21,000 per server.

Nick Janakas, IT project manager at the network solutions center for Motorola Inc. in Arlington Heights, Ill., is eager to test the ServerFree Agent software. Janakas' team backs up 1,400 servers to ATL 7000 series tape libraries that contain more than 10,000 tapes. "I want to see if it will speed the backup and increase the throughput with our robotic tape libraries," he says.

NetBackup 4.0V works with the Veritas Foundation Suite, which comprises a file system, a volume manager, and clustering and SAN-management software. Matt Adduci, a systems engineer at Credit Suisse First Boston Corp. in New York, says he relies so heavily on the Foundation Suite that he's considering switching storage-hardware vendors. Compaq is his company's SAN provider, but its storage arrays don't support the dynamic multipartitioning of Veritas' Foundation Suite. Hitachi, a competing storage vendor, does.

Says Adduci, "I might get Hitachi in here to fix it."

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