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During installation, we spent more time fighting with and configuring the Oracle EBU than we did the Legato module. The Legato module itself is only a scrawny 750 KB packaged over seven files. The work is done in the EBU unit. Even initiating an unscheduled backup was done using the Oracle command obackup. Once our scripts were configured, we used the administration tool on the backup server to add our Oracle server as a Unix client "with directives." Simply by including the appropriate directive, we could include our backup script along with file-system backups for the DBMS.

We've heavily criticized vendors for not providing better cross-platform support; to be fair, Legato has announced additions to its agent line that will include Informix, SAP R/3, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange for both Unix and Windows NT platforms. These should be available sometime this quarter. But it remains to be seen if vendors can implement these agents as comprehensively as they have their workstation clients.

Seagate Software Backup Exec 6 Enterprise Edition
At first look, Backup Exec and ARCserve are strikingly similar. Both look the same, operate the same and have almost identical options. Backup Exec, however, offers slightly fewer features and has weak client support. Otherwise, it gets the job don e just as well as the other options.

Backup Exec, Storage Director and ARCserve resemble each other in a remarkable way when it comes to displaying the DBMS resources to be backed up. All three provide the familiar graphical tree where the specific databases can be checked off. Furthermore, the options specific to backing up the database were clearly presented in a dialog box when the job was scheduled, not tucked away under a right-click as they were for the Cheyenne product. This is just user interface stuff, but it made Backup Exec easy to use.

Interestingly, Seagate's Backup Exec is the only one of the products we tested that operates as a true DBMS client; it employs the native (Net-Library for Microsoft SQL Server, for example) DBMS middleware to access the database directly as a client. The other products run a separate agent on the DBMS server, which subsequently dumps the data back to the backup server. Although Backup Exec isn't an agent in the same sense as the others, we found it surprisi ng that this approach isn't more widespread. It would provide far more cross-platform support for a variety of DBMS platforms that are in use.

As a result of Seagate's direct client implementation, setting up the DBMS for backup was as simple as selecting the Microsoft SQL Server in Backup Exec's tree list. The SQL Server and Exchange options are not turned on by default, so we did have to dig around to turn them on.

Seagate Software Backup Director Backup Agent for Microsoft SQL Server and Agent for Oracle7 Server
Backup Director is Seagate's second backup server line, but it has less to offer than Backup Exec. The marketing representatives from Seagate suggested their company's Backup Director software is better suited to enterprise installations because of its tie-in with Storage Manager hierarchical storage management (HSM) options. It's doubtful that you would want to set up your database files as part of a hierarchical storage management system, so it m akes integration with Storage Manager a hard sell. More important, we found database clients were lacking in every area compared to the other database agents.

Backup Director's biggest problem is it treats all backups as full database snapsh ots. For SQL Server, this meant we could select individual databases, but we couldn't select just the transaction logs to make incremental backups. With Oracle it was even more restrictive; we couldn't select individual table spaces or the redo logs. This can be very important when managing Oracle databases because it produces archived log files. We couldn't understand why Backup Director does let you select individual table spaces for restore.

Ease of use was Backup Director's other bane. Navigating Backup Director's window interface was a chore. We could see this was clearly a problem with the core server product, but it had a strong impact on our effectiveness nevertheless.

On the DBMS server, Backup Director requires you to set Named Pipes as the default c lient protocol. This might not be a problem for the backup server, but we ran into conflicts with our SQL Server clients, which we typically have set to use TCP/IP as the default. This trouble easily is resolved by renaming the client configurations, though Seagate should provide a better method of handling this. Although we couldn't completely test it in this round, the Backup Director line offers complete cross-platform database client support between the Windows NT and Novell NetWare versions of Backup Director. We see this as being an important factor if you're using a NetWare version of Director and need to back up a Windows NT application server.

Anthony Frey can be reached at afrey@nwc.com.

Our test environment consisted of a Micron Millennia running Windows NT 4.0 with an Exabyte Corp. 2-GB, 8-mm tape drive with compression as our backup server. We alternated installations of the backup server software on this server as necessary.

For our RDBMS, we ran Oracle7 for Windows NT and Microsoft SQL Server version 6.5 on a Dell Computer Corp. Pentium XPS90, and Oracle7 for HP-UX on a Hewlett-Packard Co. 9000/817. Our tests included a series of full and partial database backup and recovery procedures using a 150-MB test database.