Arkeia Network Backup 5.3 review

Dave Mitchell Read more October 7, 2009

£1015

Price when reviewed

Mainstream data-protection products that support heterogeneous networks generally combine workstation agents for each operating system with a centralised Windows server. Even enterprise-level products that started life under Unix, such as EMC Legato NetWorker, have subsequently been ported over to Windows environments. However, Arkeia Network Backup (ANB) is one of a dwindling number that has remained true to its roots. Consequently, ANB requires a Unix or Linux system as the core backup server and uses agents to support remote backup of Windows, NetWare and Macintosh platforms.

ANB supports an extensive range of SCSI tape drives and libraries, and offers optional plug-in modules for hot backup of Exchange, DB2, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL servers. A disaster-recovery module can create bootable CD-ROMs for automatically restoring client systems, and a new feature in this release is support for disk-to-disk (D2D) backup. However, bear in mind that the starting price is comparatively steep, since it includes support for only two clients.

For testing, we used a Pentium III system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and found installation a remarkably simple process. A single Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) file loads the server components and it also installs the X-Windows administrative GUI, which is started from a command-line prompt. The GUI is reasonably easy to use, but looks crude when compared with the slick interfaces offered by CA BrightStor ARCserve and Veritas Backup Exec. ANB uses a similar three-tier concept, where the central servers run the main program, look after locally attached backup devices and manage remote client backup. You can also have multiple backup servers, and the GUI is able to manage them all from a single system.

Starting your first backup isn’t so easy due to the methods used by ANB. In typical Unix fashion, you have to define objects for all tape drives and individual media, and then place them into pools. Identical tape drives can be combined into DrivePacks, which allow ANB to use multiple drives for backup jobs. Data sources must be declared as SavePacks, which describe clients, paths and filenames. However, once created, SavePacks can save time, as they may include data from multiple sources. We found D2D backup a pain to set up, because the Virtual Tape Library module uses tape simulation and hard disk paths to achieve this, but the topic is barely covered in the manual.

ANB supports full, incremental and differential backups, and jobs can be run on demand or at regular intervals using a scheduler. Windows clients require a single service installed to allow them to be remotely accessed, and you can select the Registry, drives and folders for backup. Local performance using an HP Ultrium LTO-2 drive wasn’t overly impressive. ANB backed up 9.5GB of test data at an average of only 1,250MB/min – about 30 per cent slower than ARCserve and Backup Exec.

ANB is clearly a versatile data-protection product. It’s capable of supporting an extensive client base and can be upgraded with a wide range of plug-in modules. However, although you can save cash using a dedicated Linux backup server, we wouldn’t recommend it for small businesses. It’s too complex to use and costs substantially more than the main Windows-based competition.