Legato NetWorker 6.0
NetWorker comes packaged with a media kit and hard-copy versions of an Administrator's Guide, a Disaster Recovery Guide, and a Performance Tuning Guide. I used the PDF Installation Guide (which I found on the Documentation Suite CD-ROM) while installing and configuring the software.
NetWorker detects and supports a wide range of standalone drives, tape libraries, and silo devices that you can use as backup targets. To configure the ADIC tape library, which Legato refers to as an autochanger, I used Legato's text-based Jbconfig utility. Jbconfig detected the autochanger, then walked me through the process of configuring the tape devices within the library. Overall, the process was fairly straightforward but required some manual configuration at the drive level.
I installed the appropriate backup clients for my environment from the local CD-ROM drives on those systems. In all cases, installation was easy and straightforward. However, because of an error in the documentation about the NetWare installation script's pathname, I spent more time in the NetWare System Console than I wanted to.
I installed the NetWorker BusinesSuite Module for Microsoft SQL Server from the local CD-ROM drive on each server that required the module. The program easily installed the module, which didn't require configuration.
NetWorker Administrator
The NetWorker Administrator program is the primary tool for performing backups and restores. Figure 5, page 56, shows the graphical NetWorker Administrator interface. The interface comprises the Network window in the left pane, the Server window in the right pane, and the Message window on the bottom. The Network window displays NetWorker clients and servers. Before you can perform any operations on clients, you must manually add them to the Network window. The Server window contains information about the backup server you connect to.
You can enable auto-media management for standalone tape drives and tape libraries. Auto-media management simplifies the task of managing media by automatically labeling, mounting, and recycling media when appropriate. In my testing, auto-media management performed flawlessly. The software uses media pools and associated criteria to ensure that data targets appropriate volumes. NetWorker also provides automatic or manual cloning of backup volumes and save sets for redundancy or offsite storage. NetWorker has strong media-management and device-management facilities with a good balance of easy operations and powerful capabilities.
Backup
For each client computer that you want to back up, you must create a client in NetWorker Administrator. For any one computer, you can create multiple client entries, each with a different backup specification. For each of my SQL Server systems, I created one client entry to back up the typical Windows file system and another entry to back up the SQL Server databases. Also in NetWorker Administrator, I created groups and added appropriate clients to each group. I created a group named Windows Machines (to hold the clients that I configured to back up the typical Windows files) and a group named SQL Servers (to hold the clients that I configured to back up the SQL Server databases). Because NetWorker initiates scheduled and ad hoc backups at the group level, I granularly defined clients and placed them into groups. NetWorker performed my test backups without difficulty.
Data Recovery
To accommodate different environments—for example, one environment might require users to call a dedicated backup administrator to initiate a restore, and another environment might require end users or administrators to initiate restores—NetWorker provides several data-recovery methods. You can restore files through the NetWorker UI from a client system or through a Directed Recovery (i.e., a server-initiated recovery that never touches the client). To restore SQL Server data, I referred to the instructions about the product's BusinesSuite Module for Microsoft SQL Server in the online Administrator's Guide. NetWorker required that I perform the restore from the SQL Server machine rather than from the backup server. To initiate the recovery, I could use the Recover command with appropriate arguments, or I could use the NetWorker User for SQL Server GUI. From the GUI, I clicked the Recover button on the toolbar, selected the database I wanted to recover, and clicked Start to initiate the process.
To accomplish individual table restores for SQL Server 6.5, you can use the NetWorker Module 2.0.1 for Microsoft SQL Server. I tested only NetWorker Module 3.0 for Microsoft SQL Server, which supports filegroup-level restores for SQL Server 7.0 and partial-database restores for SQL Server 2000. NetWorker offers point-in-time recovery capabilities.
Performance
The Performance Tuning Guide provides suggestions for testing and tuning backup performance. NetWorker has three key settings for fine-tuning the application for different environments: Server Parallelism, Client Parallelism, and Multiplexing. Compared with this review's other products, NetWorker's overall nontuned backup and restore performance is average, as Graph 1 and Graph 2 show.
Impressions
Although NetWorker wasn't difficult to configure, it felt different from a typical Windows product. During some operations (e.g., displaying details, editing a group while a backup ran), the NetWorker Administrator interface seemed unresponsive, as if the system were under a heavy load. However, Performance Monitor showed low system utilization during these times. Another minor drawback is that the program offers limited logging and monitoring of restore jobs. On the plus side, NetWorker performed well and has strong media-management and library-management facilities.
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