I might be sliced up in small pieces and boiled in dog-oil for this, but here are my personal reasons:
First and foremost, NetWorker is essentially UNIX software. It was built in a UNIX environment and all the programs works very much "the UNIX way" with flags and switches and a lot of other possibilities to use the command line for everything. This means that the UNIX man pages for i.e. mminfo also tells you exactly how to use mminfo on a windows server. That's nice.
UNIX/Linux is generally a more stable environment for a backup server, it's easier to expand different types of storage and many tools are readily available and often free of charge, like ZFS on Solaris and deduplication software etc. etc.
On UNIX/Linux there are two tools for NetWorker that does not exist for windows, these are:
visual mode in nsradmin (a text-based management menu tool that can do the same as NMC)
nsrwatch (a text-based realtime monitoring tool that shows what the server is actually doing right now)
My experiences:
I support a number of customers, all running NetWorker on their backup servers. Most of them are using Windows on their backup servers, and a few are using UNIX/Linux. The ones that are using UNIX/Linux only very rarely have issues with their backup servers, they pretty much just work. The ones who use windows are our best customers, since they have more issues and need more help. Maybe this is because NetWorker is more foreign to them, I can't say for sure. But I do have the impression that windows as an OS in this situation is more prone to errors than UNIX/Linux.
I worked at a customer site for 6 months some time ago, they had 3500 backup clients and 20 backup servers, including storage nodes. All backup servers were running Solaris and had huge tape libraries or disk systems (DataDomain and NetApp) for storage. They ran very smoothly, and the only clients we had real issues with were the windows clients, the UNIX clients(of which there were around 30%) never really had any problems.
So, if it was up to me, I'd choose Linux over windows on my backup servers anytime.
tonyalbers
75 Posts
0
March 25th, 2011 05:00
Hi Robert,
I might be sliced up in small pieces and boiled in dog-oil for this, but here are my personal reasons:
First and foremost, NetWorker is essentially UNIX software. It was built in a UNIX environment and all the programs works very much "the UNIX way" with flags and switches and a lot of other possibilities to use the command line for everything. This means that the UNIX man pages for i.e. mminfo also tells you exactly how to use mminfo on a windows server. That's nice.
UNIX/Linux is generally a more stable environment for a backup server, it's easier to expand different types of storage and many tools are readily available and often free of charge, like ZFS on Solaris and deduplication software etc. etc.
On UNIX/Linux there are two tools for NetWorker that does not exist for windows, these are:
visual mode in nsradmin (a text-based management menu tool that can do the same as NMC)
nsrwatch (a text-based realtime monitoring tool that shows what the server is actually doing right now)
My experiences:
I support a number of customers, all running NetWorker on their backup servers. Most of them are using Windows on their backup servers, and a few are using UNIX/Linux. The ones that are using UNIX/Linux only very rarely have issues with their backup servers, they pretty much just work. The ones who use windows are our best customers, since they have more issues and need more help. Maybe this is because NetWorker is more foreign to them, I can't say for sure. But I do have the impression that windows as an OS in this situation is more prone to errors than UNIX/Linux.
I worked at a customer site for 6 months some time ago, they had 3500 backup clients and 20 backup servers, including storage nodes. All backup servers were running Solaris and had huge tape libraries or disk systems (DataDomain and NetApp) for storage. They ran very smoothly, and the only clients we had real issues with were the windows clients, the UNIX clients(of which there were around 30%) never really had any problems.
So, if it was up to me, I'd choose Linux over windows on my backup servers anytime.
HTH
/tony
ble1
4 Operator
•
14.4K Posts
0
March 25th, 2011 17:00
Newer versions have it on Windows too
I would also choose Linux.