Backing up storage is not enough, especially if you don’t know if your backup jobs were complete or whether you can recover your data when you need it.
More than one-third of all backups fail, says the Enterprise Strategy Group, and many times IT administrators don’t know about it. Those that do track the success of their backups, use primarily manual means, shifting from backup server to backup server, reviewing logs to see that the backup completed successfully.
A number of vendors including startups WysDM, Bocada, Aptare and storage giants such as EMC have released software in the past several years that reports on the status of backup jobs – they automatically collect information on each server or storage device backed up and present the information in a report on whether the backup was successful and where it failed.
Now, Symantec is getting in on the action with the release of Veritas Backup Reporter, a reporting tool that lets IT administrators view their backup and recovery operations and provide a mechanism for IT administrators to achieve cost analysis, departmental visibility and chargeback.
Backup Reporter allows reporting of Symantec’s Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec products, as well as EMC Legato Networker, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Commvault Galaxy. It aggregates historical data and lets IT forecast trends and justify the need for capital expenditures for additional tape drives, servers or backup media.
IT administrators can assess backup operations in a hierarchical fashion by drilling down to individual backup servers and use many out-of-the-box reports or design reports of their own.
Symantec’s Backup Reporter runs on a Solaris or Windows server and uses NetScape or Internet Explorer as its management interface. It can backup AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux or Windows host computers.
Veritas Backup Reporter pricing ranges from 135 to $600 per backup device.