BakBone’s NetVault Enterprise Edition supports enterprise backup-and-restoration functions for the majority of hosts and clients we tested, missing only SGI IRIX and SCO UnixWare.
It also supported every type of backup media that we used in testing.
The vendor supplied a long list of applications it backs up and restores for a price, including Oracle, MySQL, Lotus Notes, Sybase, VMware/ESX and SAP.
NetVault provides two main administrative applications with its general system, Configurator and the NetVault GUI. Configurator sets logging levels; sets up ports for communications among clients and storage devices; schedules jobs; and sets tuning parameters and details for backup, restoration and infrastructure for these.
The NetVault application performs simple, full or incremental backups. It can have additional memory buffers assigned in the server, a feature that has a decided impact on performance — more buffers render faster backup throughput.
The NetVault documentation provides good details on how to tune performance for speedier backups. NetVault 7.4 uses compression, but supports encryption only in an add-on module.
It was simple to manage backups and restorations across the platforms we tested. NetVault doesn’t provide for cloning machines and also doesn’t make available a rapid-restoration methodology in case of client hard-disk failure.
This means that the case of failure, clients, whether workstations or servers, must have an initial operating-system restoration and must download the NetVault client software before they can have data, applications and settings restored, a process that adds significantly to the unavailability of a disaster-stricken machine.
NetVault records the details of each job — when it was run, by whom, and its success or failure. It also maintains a security log of authentications that can be exported to a file. Additionally, you can create customized reports and send automatically generated reports via e-mail.
Overall, BakBone NetVault gets credit for its breadth of platform coverage, but it isn’t as useful as the other products tested in terms of rapid restoration of a platform from a disastrous circumstance.
