Symantec Corp. has announced Veritas Backup Reporter, aimed at
providing backup reporting for its NetBackup and Backup Exec
products, as well as IBM's TSM, EMC Corp.'s Legato and CommVault
Inc.'s Galaxy backup software.
The product "is pretty much on a par with other heterogeneous
backup reporting tools out there," said Lauren Whitehouse, an
analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "It's got all the
major things covered."
Previously, Symantec had backup reporting capabilities in a
dashboard attached to NetBackup, as well as within the
CommandCentral storage resource management (SRM) tool, but in terms
of a unified backup reporting product with heterogeneous support,
had lacked an offering until now. In that regard, Symantec is
trailing EMC, which has been rebranding WysDM Software Inc.'s
product as its Backup Advisor for 18 months.
One NetBackup user, Brad Gates, director of IT infrastructure for
Foster's Wine Estates America, said he would most likely be taking
a look at the product. "NetBackup is a big part of our
environment," he said. Foster's Wine has around 40 NetBackup
licenses, he said, and up until now his backup administrators have
been printing out log screens or pasting them into Word documents
to report on backups.
"NetBackup has definitely been lacking in this area," he
said.
Pricing could be an issue; no support yet for
PureDisk
Backup Reporter is more expensive than competitive products:
pricing starts at $15,000 for 25 server licenses; $35,000 for 100
servers; $85,000 for 500 servers; and $135,000 for 1,000 servers.
Modules for managing backup software other than NetBackup and
Backup Exec cost $20,000 each. So if a customer had 500 NetBackup
servers and 500 TSM servers, they would purchase the 1,000-pack of
licenses plus the TSM option, for a total of $155,000.
"At that price, [Backup Reporter] would have to be justified as
a capital expense for me," Gates said, meaning he would have to
wait until his company's next budget cycle to evaluate the Symantec
product.
By comparison, WysDM supports multiple backup vendors at $15,000
for a base installation and 50 client licenses. Aptare Inc.'s
average cost nets out to about $100 per client, and the average
deal runs around $40,000 to $70,000. Bocada Inc.'s subscription
service for a 500-unit implementation starts at around $13,500 per
year including maintenance.
"We have a unique proposition with NetBackup users in terms of
the cross navigation between Backup Reporter and the NetBackup core
product," said Kristine Mitchell, NetBackup product marketing
manager for Symantec, when asked about the difference in pricing
between Backup Reporter and competitors' products.
Backup Reporter is integrated in some areas with NetBackup,
including hooks into NetBackup Version 6.0. This can allow Backup
Reporter users to "drill down" into backup jobs that have failed,
relate them to a particular host and then either reset policies or
initiate a backup. The two products will now use a single sign-on,
said Erica Antoni, product manager for Backup Reporter, but taking
action within NetBackup requires clicking a link to open up the
NetBackup console.
Also, with NetBackup only, Backup Reporter can allow monitoring
in "realtime" without polling servers and can show in-progress jobs
as well as their expected time to completion.
In the end, according to Whitehouse, aside from the single login
and link to the NetBackup management console, Backup Reporter "is
still really a standalone product."
Whitehouse also pointed out that this first iteration of Backup
Reporter contains one glaring omission -- it doesn't support
Symantec's NetBackup PureDisk. "I would hope they integrate that
soon," Whitehouse said. "WysDM is already integrated with Avamar on
the EMC side." Support for PureDisk will be added in the next
couple of months, according to Antoni.
Comparisons with third-party tools
In general, reporting capabilities included in Backup Reporter
are more in-depth than previous offerings from Symantec, but less
granular in some areas than some products from backup-reporting
focused startups.
Aptare's StorageConsole product, for example, also covers
NetBackup, TSM and Legato, but retains reports from each software
type in the idiom of the application within its report manager.
Backup Reporter, according to Symantec, "normalizes" the language
of alerts across all parts of the application.
"This is really intended for upper level management within the
data center," Antoni said. "The CIO of the company is more
concerned with whether the data is protected, and if it can be
recovered -- this tool gives that information at a glance."
"There are advantages to both [sets of products]," Whitehouse
said. A backup administrator would be used to a certain view of a
particular backup product, but that person could still use that
particular product's interface for hands-on troubleshooting. For a
manager, however, the key questions revolve around audits,
compliance and how the whole environment is working, Whitehouse
said.