Users suffer major problems with Symantec NetBackup 6.0

Users are saying that problems with Symantec's latest version of Veritas NetBackup are keeping them from rolling out the application even though the data backup and recovery product was shipped more than a year ago.

Veritas announced NetBackup 6.0 in April 2005 and began shipping it in October, just after Symantec announced that it was buying Veritas.

Users on at least two Web site forums dedicated to Symantec customers said they are hoping that Symantec's Maintenance Pack 4, due out around October, will fix bugs they're finding in NetBackup 6.0. The most recent maintenance pack, No. 3, was made available on June 30.

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Users are saying that problems with Symantec's latest version of Veritas NetBackup are keeping them from rolling out the application even though the data backup and recovery product was shipped more than a year ago.

Veritas announced NetBackup 6.0 in April 2005 and began shipping it in October, just after Symantec announced that it was buying Veritas.

Users on at least two Web site forums dedicated to Symantec customers said they are hoping that Symantec's Maintenance Pack 4, due out around October, will fix bugs they're finding in NetBackup 6.0. The most recent maintenance pack, No. 3, was made available on June 30.

Bank of Canada, whose job it is to issue money for that country like the Federal Reserve in the United States, plans on staying at NetBackup Version 5.0 "until it's apparent things with 6.0 have improved," said Paul Keating, an IT manager at the bank, which is based in Ottawa.

Problems cited by other users include issues with the vault service, which automates tape rotation; the scheduler, which lets users specify the times that backups are run; and the Job Manager service, which accepts backup jobs and then runs them. When these features don't work, automated backups can't be performed and aren't saving the data properly when they do, users said.

"The vault service won't start," said Steve Bally, systems engineer for RadiSys, a Hillsboro, Ore., engineering company that has been using NetBackup for a number of years. Without the vaulting service, Bally said, he can't perform tape duplication or send backups off-site because of problems with NetBackup.

Bally said he doesn't plan on rolling out NetBackup 6.0 until the vaulting service issues are fixed, so he has not yet experienced the scheduler problem described by several other users on the Web site forums for Symantec customers.

There are about 36,000 users of NetBackup, according to Symantec. Mike Adams, group manager for Symantec's NetBackup product marketing, said he could not say how many of those users have migrated to Version 6.0. "Anecdotal evidence" is that there is "good uptake," he said.

One major issue Veritas users cited with NetBackup 6.0 is that when a backup job indicates it's complete, it often has only backed up 1K files, so there's no data to restore. Bally characterized Veritas 5.1, which he was using before 6.0, as "solid" but said he wanted to use Version 6.0 for new services, such as the ability to restore Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server services.

Another major problem reported by users is an issue with the Job Manager. Due to problems with this feature, "NetBackup management went from maybe 30 percent of my time to 60 percent or more," said Phil Rand, senior systems analyst and systems administrator for Seattle Pacific University. Not only did backup jobs fail, but they would disappear from the activity monitor so that Rand might not notice they were missing, he said. Rand has received binaries from Symantec, in advance of Maintenance Pack 4, to help him fix the problem, he said.

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