BakBone Gives Away NetVault To Red Hat Users

Following Red Hat in giving the software away and charging for support, BakBone Software is giving away a special free-use edition of its NetVault backup software. The free-use edition can handle backup for up to two client servers and up to 500 GB of disk through NetVault's built-in software virtual tape library, which makes standard disk emulate a tape library.

Howard Marks, Network Computing Blogger

June 23, 2008

1 Min Read
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Following Red Hat in giving the software away and charging for support, BakBone Software is giving away a special free-use edition of its NetVault backup software. The free-use edition can handle backup for up to two client servers and up to 500 GB of disk through NetVault's built-in software virtual tape library, which makes standard disk emulate a tape library.BakBone is offering two support options: annual SMB support for $50/client and $200 for each 500 GB of VTL capacity and business-day support for 8 hours, 5 days a week. Enterprise support with 7/24 response is $600/yr.

This, combined with BakBone's decision this month to allow users to download evaluation versions of NetVault as Symantec has for a long time, should lead to more sampling of NetVault and, as users grow into it, hopefully more sales. NetVault, like SyncSort's Backup Express and HP's Data Protector, has been stuck in the second tier of backup solutions while CommVault's Simpana Backup (formerly Galaxy) has gained mindshare just below the big three of EMC, Symantec, and IBM.

It still will have to compete with Amanda open source backup and recovery software, which will always be dear to the hearts of open source zealots as an open source project itself.

About the Author

Howard Marks

Network Computing Blogger

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Deepstorage LLC, a storage consultancy and independent test lab based in Santa Fe, N.M. and concentrating on storage and data center networking. In more than 25 years of consulting, Marks has designed and implemented storage systems, networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, J.P. Morgan, Borden Foods, U.S. Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide, Foxwoods Resort Casino and the State University of New York at Purchase. The testing at DeepStorage Labs is informed by that real world experience.

He has been a frequent contributor to Network Computing and InformationWeek since 1999 and a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Interop and Microsoft's TechEd since 1990. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams).

He is co-host, with Ray Lucchesi of the monthly Greybeards on Storage podcast where the voices of experience discuss the latest issues in the storage world with industry leaders.  You can find the podcast at: http://www.deepstorage.net/NEW/GBoS

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