Vista affords users a narrow view of network backup

By David Strom (5/20/96)

When I first heard about Seagate's latest storage management product, I was intrigued. Called Visual Storage Administrator or Vista, the product is designed to be a control and alert console for Palindrome's Backup Director and Storage Manager network backup products. Think NetView just for backups, and you'll begin to get the right idea.

However, the more I worked with the product, the less I liked it -- this is very much a work in progress and while Seagate has laid a nice foundation, there isn't much of a visable house yet. Unless you are desperate for putting more backup management in place, I'd suggest holding off until at least the first floor goes up on Vista. And more importantly, Vista isn't yet enough of a compelling reason to switch from some other backup solution -- yet.

Vista is supposed to be a single place that a network administrator can monitor what is going on with their backups: did a tape fail to load? which files didn't get backed up? Did a server go off-line just before the nightly backup job was supposed to execute? These are the kinds of questions that keep a network administrator awake some nights, especially when he or she gets a call wondering why someone can't restore files from a tape.

To do this with most backup software is a pain in the log file: you have to know your way around, remember to check the nightly logs first thing in the morning, and also remember to check that your tapes are rotated and ran correctly. Enter the opportunity for Vista.

However, it is far from a one-stop shopping experience. First off, Vista is not a simple product to install and configure. The problem is you have to decide where you want your console: if you have Palindrome backup servers running on both NT and NetWare file servers, you'll need to run two separate Vista consoles, one for each type of server. This is because a NetWare console can't communicate with an NT "hub" -- Palindrome's lingo for the machine keeping track of the various agents and backup servers. Things start to get a bit confusing because the NT version of Backup Director can backup a NetWare file server, including its directory services files.

All of the Palindrome products, including Vista, make use of the same Connection Manager agents to communicate among servers. If you are already using Palindrome backups, you already have this software installed to do your backups across the network. So much the better for Vista.

A unified console for both NT and NetWare is coming eventually, according to Seagate representatives. While they are unifying things, Seagate might also want to develop Vista agents for the rest of its Arcada backup line, so that network administrators could really use a single machine to keep track of all of their protected resources. That isn't in the works yet.

There are some differences on how users get notified by Vista when an alert happens. If your hub is running on NetWare, users can get alerts via MHS mail, while if it is running on NT users can get alerts via Microsoft Mail. You can also send SNMP alerts on either critical events, informational events, or both (for the sanity of your SNMP manager, I would suggest the former only, please). You get to pick what kind of alert is informational and what kind is critical.

This alert system is somewhat primative. Other products have more alert categories and can do more than just send email -- Intel's Landesk can send this information to a pager for example.

All in all, the product works as advertised. It does a reasonable job of keeping track of where your backups are and more importantly, aren't. I attempted to introduce various troubles such as pulling the tape out of the drive, shutting down a server, and other mayhem, and Vista reliably reported these events. I just wish it covered more of the backup server waterfront.

Visual Storage Administrator (VISTA) v 1.1 Enterprise Edition

Vista's intent is to provide a single console to manage your enterprise backups but is still far from a complete solution.

Pro: VISTA has the beginnings of a solid backup management framework

Con: If you have a mixture of Palindrome backup products for NT and NetWare, you'll need to have separate VISTA consoles. VISTA does not support other Seagate backup products such as Arcada.

Palindrome Corp.

Naperville, Il.

800 288 4912

Price:$1995 single server (includes both NetWare and NT consoles), additional console are $795 each

Platforms: Either Windows NT Workstation or Server 3.5 with Service Pack 2 or better; or NetWare 3.11 or better (console runs on Windows 3.1 workstation)

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