BakBone Claims Disk Space Reporting Breakthrough

BakBone has introduced centralized reporting for distributed NetVault backup jobs and a disk space analysis tool able to send file pick lists directly to NetVault. NetVault: Report Manager 3 has two modules to carry out these functions.

NetVault: Report Manager for Backup provides centralized reporting for NetVault backup jobs running on Windows, Unix and Linux servers across a business.

NetVault: Report Manager for Disk Space reports on what files exist in what server disk stores across an enterprise. From a single screen, administrative staff can identify files to be archived and stored on less expensive drives or offline on tape.

They can generate jobs for NetVault to move, copy, delete or archive indicated files.

Admin staff can also drill down into a cross-enterprise backup report to identify problems on any NetVault backup job, drive or media.

Chip Olsen, a senior systems engineer for Woodgrain Millwork, said: “It now takes five minutes to review a consolidated report, whereas it used to take more than two hours a week to complete the review process.”

Andrew Martin, strategic alliance’s director for BakBone, said: “There are other backup reporters out there. Ours is purely for BakBone. Others are generic and go across other products—for example, Bocada and WysDM.”

“There are other storage resource reporting tools [disk space analyzers] in the marketplace. We’ve hit on the right combination of simplicity of use, providing powerful and usable information and a great price point with a product that goes across Windows, Unix and Linux systems. The combination is unique, particularly at that price point.”

Asked if sysadmins need to have extra skills to use it, he said: “I don’t think so. Typically they know what they want to know about data; they know what they are looking for. We’ve made it very easy to find that out in, for example, environments with 50 million files or more.”

Queried about the applicability of the 50 million files number, he said: “It’s absolutely realistic. Even in the small and medium enterprise area, it’s not unusual. We’ve worked with a county council which has 80 million files.”

BakBone’s NetVault: Report Manager version 3.0 is immediately available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Snap Guardian OS server operating environments.

Pricing per supported server starts at 350 pounds (US$644) for NetVault: Report Manager for Backup and 245 pounds for NetVault: Report Manager for Disk Space.

-Chris Mellor, Techworld.com (London)

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