UltraBac 6.3 Enterprise Edition
UltraBac arrived in a folder that contained one CD-ROM and a printed User's Manual. I used the Full Install option to install the software on my backup server. Per an UltraBac support technician's request, I updated the driver for the autochanger in Win2K with an UltraBac-supplied driver. Then, to ensure that the application properly enumerated all the tape library's slots and drives, I opened the UltraBac program and selected Media Changer from the Tools menu.
UltraBac doesn't offer any client-side software for Windows computers. To transport backup data, the product uses standard Windows network connections. UltraBac also offers no client-side software components for SQL Server, although you must install the SQL Client Network Utility on the backup server to enable appropriate access.
A Very Simple Interface
UltraBac's interface, which Figure 7 shows, isn't as slick as some of the other products' interfaces, but it's straightforward and effective. The first time you open the interface, Backup mode appears. From the Mode menu, you can select Restore, Verify, and Archive modes, and you can set any of these options as the default mode. The interface doesn't change as you select different modes, but available menu options do.
Tape Library and Media Control
Before UltraBac can be a serious contender in the enterprise backup and recovery arena, the company needs to improve its tape-library and media control. Although the product successfully recognized the ADIC tape library and let me easily perform manual media functions, the lack of media-allocation and drive-allocation automation is a drawback. Also, the product somewhat oversimplifies media management for large environments and lacks automated features for implementing a comprehensive media-management scheme. However, UltraBac does contain a facility for manually creating copies of tapes for archiving or redundancy.
Backup
Because I didn't need to install any agents on most of my environment's clients, I was able to start backing up systems 30 minutes after I installed the software. The processes of creating and running backup jobs are simple. You first create sets, which contain the set of files you want to back up. Then, you create a group, which contains one or more sets. You perform backups by groups. To create backup sets for the various machines in my environment, I selected New from the Backup menu. A wizard helped me define the set that I wanted to back up. Next, the software wrote a text-file definition for the set to the UltraBac directory. To create additional backup sets, I modified several of these intuitively formatted text files and saved them under different names.
To create a group, you choose Schedule Backups from the Scheduler menu. You use the Scheduler dialog box for both scheduling and configuring backup groups. A large array of settings are available at the group level—including device targeting, verification, and media handling. After you configure a schedule and add one or more sets to the group, you click Run Now to immediately execute the specified backups. I configured multiple groups (logically organized by computer type), then tried scheduling some jobs and manually running the remaining jobs. All the backup jobs executed as expected.
Data Recovery
To enable the restore-associated menus in UltraBac's interface, I selected Restore from the Mode menu. To initiate a restore, I could choose to load the index from either the storage media or from disk. For my restore activities, I used the indexes stored on disk. After I chose which index to use, the software displayed a list of available backups to restore. I then selected the objects I wanted to restore from a Windows Explorer—like interface and clicked Perform Restore. UltraBac supports individual table restores for SQL Server 6.5 and filegroup-level restores for SQL Server 2000 and 7.0. The product doesn't offer a point-in-time restore option. Restore operations in my environment worked as expected and performed nicely.
Performance
Backup and restore performance was impressive; however, the inability to automate the use of multiple drives and multiple data streams will be a drawback in busy backup environments. To use multiple drives simultaneously, I needed to schedule multiple groups to execute at the same time—allowing some buffer time so that robot activities from one job could finish before another job started.
A Scrappy Competitor
Given UltraBac's simple and compact design, I didn't expect it to perform as well as it did. Although the product requires some server-side software (i.e., a SQL Server client) to enable special backups, the functionality that the product provides without requiring client-side agents is impressive. Automated media and device management, however, isn't UltraBac's strong suit. The product doesn't intelligently load-balance between drives to exploit the power of multidrive tape libraries. UltraBac's low price and operational simplicity make it an attractive option for organizations that don't require highly automated performance management for their backup operations. However, if Win2K System State backups are important to you, the current version's inability to perform them on remote clients could be a serious detriment.
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