Computer Associates' ARCserve 6.5 and Legato Systems' NetWorker 4.4.1
As part of the Lab's ongoing effort to help systems administrators make informed decisions about choosing the best backup solution to protect their intellectual property, I've reviewed two more solutions. I tested Computer Associates' ARCserve 6.5 for Windows NT, Enterprise Edition and Legato Systems' NetWorker 4.4.1 Power Edition for Windows NT to determine the pitfalls and pluses of these two established products.
With ARCserve, Cheyenne, now a division of Computer Associates, has done what few other vendors have been able to accomplish: create a powerful backup solution that is easy to operate. By using tabs intelligently and combining like functions on single screens for control purposes, Computer Associates engineers have produced an interface that competing vendors need to look at. ARCserve also has its share of bells and whistles.
NetWorker has traditionally been the choice for administrators with very large, distributed networks. Legato Systems has been producing NetWorker for more than 10 years, and it offers IS professionals one of the most robust packages on the market. NetWorker supports more file structures and operating systems than any competing product. Although this package is powerful and loaded with features, it remains a solution that only those users familiar with Legato Systems' terminology can implement easily.
ARCserve 6.5 for Windows NT, Enterprise Edition
Computer Associates is on the right track with the latest iteration of its backup and archival solution, ARCserve 6.5 for Windows NT, Enterprise Edition. This full-featured software is easy to install. It instantly recognized my network and the recording devices attached to it. In less than 5 minutes, using one of the many wizards available in the opening screen of the software, I had my first backup job running with ARCserve.
You can choose from two different palettes of wizards in ARCserve:
- The Wizard Quick Access palette, which includes Backup, Restore, Device, and Disaster Recovery/Boot Disk wizards
- The Classic Quick Access palette, which has 15 different wizards that offer reports, media pool management, and data migration, among other features
When I clicked on the Backup wizard, a small, Explorer-like window opened and displayed the server drives with their partitions labeled and identified (NTFS or FAT), a check box for system Registry files, a Network icon, and a Cheyenne Agents icon. Screen 1, page 110, shows my network and clients.
You click the Network icon to display network clients. You can then select these clients to display their disk drives and a check box that you can select for backing up the client's Registry. This feature is nice because it reminds systems administrators that these files need to be backed up, and it offers an avenue to quickly rebuild systems that have failed for a reason other than a crashed hard disk. The Cheyenne Agents icon is where you define the platforms for ARCserve to back up. Your options include Windows 3.X, Windows 95, Windows NT, NetWare, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX.
After you select the files you want to back up, the program asks you which media group you want to use for the operation. (By default ARCserve loads each device separately into its own group.) After you select your media group, the software asks you what kind of backup you want to perform: full, for machines that have never been backed up, or incremental, for only the files that have changed since the last backup. The first time through the procedure, the default is to back up all the files because no incremental backups are available to compare against.
Another of ARCserve's nice features is that it keeps records of which machines have been fully backed up. ARCserve also keeps track of how long it's been since you performed a full backup.
The wizard's next screen lets you select a check box for data verification if you want to use this option. This screen is also where you can enable software compression. The last screen of the Backup wizard asks you when you want to start the backup operation: immediately or at a future scheduled time. The fully customizable backup scheduler lets you perform backups every minute, hour, day, week, or month. Finally, the Backup wizard asks you to label the job and then click Finish. Your job is scheduled and running—presumably forever.
This scenario doesn't work for backing up whole groups of machines, but it gives you an idea of how ARCserve works: You tell it what you want to do, what you need to do it, when to do it, and what you want to call the backup. Using the Restore wizard is equally intuitive.
Main Toolbar Is a Main Attraction
Although the various wizards are convenient, what sets this software apart from others is the main toolbar, a wizardless interface that is easy to use. The main toolbar provides a simple, straightforward interface to virtually all the options you need to define a job. It features three buttons: the Stoplight icon, the Options icon, and the Net icon.
After you highlight the files you want to back up, you click the Stoplight icon on the main toolbar to activate the scheduler. You can then click the Options icon on the main toolbar (this icon is a hand pointing to two canisters), which displays a window with nine different tabs. These tabs let you set everything from the archive bit adjustments on incremental backups, file encryption, and compression, to virus scanning, open file management, and a command-line prompt for ARCserve to run before or after a backup operation. This dialog box is also where you configure administrator notifications.
ARCserve has one of the most complete notification schemes I have seen. It includes support for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), email, fax, pager, Event Log, printer, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG enterprise management software. ARCserve comes bundled with the Unicenter Framework.
In addition to logging the standard events, such as a completed or failed job, ARCserve can define customized notification events. Regardless of which tab you select in the Options window, selecting any of the variables displays a short description of how your selection will affect the backup operation. This feature is great.
The third icon on the main toolbar is the Net icon, which filters the files that will be backed up. Users have the option to Include or Exclude particular files based on their extensions, attributes, modify dates (before, after, or between), access dates (before, after, or between), and directories.
Fast But Not Too Flexible
ARCserve is 32-bit and runs tape devices almost as fast as any product I have tested. The speed is fast because it bypasses NT drivers and instead writes data directly to the SCSI miniport.
Although this method is fast, it locks you into using a compatible (proprietary) Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solution, because both ARCserve and the HSM solution will need to access the tape drives. ARCserve can also use the NT drivers to access tape drives, which is the best configuration if other applications are accessing and sharing the tape drives.
Similar to most disaster recovery solutions, ARCserve requires three NT-created, ARCserve-modified disaster recovery floppies; it then adds a fourth ARCserve-specific diskette. A nice feature is that the disaster recovery routine includes the instructions on how to create the NT disks.
After making the disks and wiping all partitions from my server's 4.2GB hard disk, I started popping in the disks one by one. I was worried when ARCserve prompted me to repartition my hard disk before I had used my fourth ARCserve-specific disaster recovery floppy, but I persevered and repartitioned the hard disk in a configuration that was nothing like the original. I nearly called tech support when installation prompted me to insert the NT Workstation CD-ROM. This situation was looking a whole lot more like a reinstall of NT Workstation than reviving an old friend from a magnetic grave.
To my relief, a screen popped up and requested the fourth floppy. From this point, ARCserve prompted me again to repartition my hard disk, but this time it gave me a list of the disaster recovery sessions on the tape. The sessions included the size and location of the partitions including file structures, NTFS or FAT, and associated drive letters.
After ARCserve defined the partitions, it prompted me to reset the machine to start the process. My machine required a cold-boot to get going again, but when it came back up, ARCserve was spinning the tape drive and rebuilding the machine I had lost.
Still, this disaster recovery scheme needs a little help. It accounts for and lets you adjust the disk partitions, but my machine now says it has two FAT partitions rather than a FAT partition and an NTFS partition.
Although I ran the disaster recovery scenario several times, I could not get it to restore my NTFS partition. The data was there and ARCserve said it was going to bring back my data in NTFS, but all I got was FAT. This error is pretty serious for software that is otherwise very smooth.
After Computer Associates fixes the disaster recovery scenario, it needs to incorporate this scenario into the package rather than making you buy it as a $395 option. Including disaster recovery as an integral part of a backup solution just makes sense.
What you can't get with ARCserve is interleaving, or the ability to write multiple data streams to one tape device. This capability is a must-have in big enterprise installations; a Computer Associates representative told me that support is on the way. So, other than the absence of interleaving, the partitioning debacle, and an unreasonable disaster recovery pricing structure, what's not to like?