Networker V8.x server for Solaris x86

According to SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere Supported Platforms and... java GUI is supported on SPARC only, but then since that is running in back-end not sure how much applicable it is to NMC.  I suspect that not too many customers run x64 version of Solaris so interest to expand NMC platform portfolio might be rather small - if no existing one.  As it is best practice to run NMC away from server if you have more than 50 clients, I would suggest to check either Windows or Linux for NMC server - one of two platforms you will find virtually everywhere.

Do you mean Solaris x86 32Bit or 64Bit?

32Bit only supports NetWorker client, nothing else.
64Bit supports everything EXCEPT (!!!!!) the new NW 8.1 VBA feature.

We had this discussion with our EMC Sales, SAM, Pre-Sales and Product management yesterday.

Solaris (and Unix in general !) support will most likely more or less cease end of 2016.
Solaris x86 64 will only support NW client as well.
Strategic OS for EMC are Windows and Linux (Red Hat, SuSe Enterprise) only. Everything else will be more or less kicked out. This is a pretty damn hard decision. We're using Solaris x86 64 as our main NW Server plattform and many of our customers have their high performance applications (SAP, Oracle DB, ...) on Solaris (x86 64 & SPARC) and AIX. These are storage nodes of course.

I am not sure if EMC really can kick out UNIX completely... This would mean that they cease to support most of their enterprise customers.

_digioso wrote: I am not sure if EMC really can kick out UNIX completely... This would mean that they cease to support most of their enterprise customers.

I disagree. Take a look at big trends which are running now and pay attention to one only - virtualization. Each company has either Windows or Linux box and these are typical guests of hyper-visors. By 2016 I expect more IO intensive systems to go virtual as well.  However, for backup server, this is ideal as:

a) backup server should be dedicated box taking care of its own backup and database

b) data IO is moved to client-target communication using some API like DDBoost

c) legacy systems will use old-fashioned backup over storage node, but storage node can be either Windows or Linux or some UNIX flavor if you want (last one makes sense for proxy snapshot management unless that will be handled by API by that time - I doubt sn support will be dropped at the same time as server one)

It is bold plan and it is right direction given current trends and directions - as always, I expect this to be pushed a bit by couple of years. Of course, it is possible that some other technology will appear and will disturb overall trend direction, but when making long-term plans you can only make assumption on roadmap from known environment.

Enterprise customers still have most of their business critical platforms on UNIX based plattforms.
Our Pre-Sales guy put it that way: 90% of EMCs customers are middle-sized companies. These of course have more or less only Linux & Windows.

The other 10% however are enterprise customers. And those need performance that neither Linux nor Windows can offer.
Of course the x86 hardware got much better and faster over the last years. But... so did the UNIX hardware.

As long as the Linux Kernel isn't as performant as a Solaris/Unix Kernel is the fact will be true. The Kernels might get better in the future but today it is not. And if you need the performance for high performance computing (for example a NetWorker server with more than 800 clients or large databases) right now Unix is your choice.

SAP is trying to establish something with SAP HANA bases on SLES, but... the SAP HANA installations I've seen so far are configured pretty bad... And they have performance problems.

Yes, this is Oracle Sun x64 (AMD64 and Intel EM64T).

In the support.emc.com download portal this version can be found as "NetWorker 8.1 for Solaris AMD64".

Or if you don't want 8.1 you can take NetWorker 8.x for Solaris AMD64.

Yes, it is supported. Check the latest compatibilty matrix.

Oracle Sun x64 (AMD64 and Intel EM64T) is the first entry on page 7. And the user interface column states the NMC.
If you compare it to Oracle Sun x86 (one row below) you can see the difference. Only NW client is supported, nothing else.

I have NW 8.1.1 DA running in a Solaris x86 64 VM including NMC as well.

We got the roadmap after asking for about 3 months... While testing NW 8.1 I noticec that the VBA features are missing on my Solaris x86 64. Two service requests later and involvement of everyone we know at EMC basically resulted into my post above.
The missing VBA features are the first indicator that Unix is more or less of the roadmap. In addition to that the new DD Boost over FC feature is only supported by Windows & Linux as well. However I heard that they'll add AIX soon.

Yep, he's from EMC and he got his information directly from product management.
He said that server and storage node on Solaris x86 64 will not be supported in a couple of years (2016), so NetWorker 8.3 most likely if they keep releasing major releases every 2 years. So basically the same as Solaris x86 32. He didn't say anything about other Unix platforms directly. We didn't ask about them directly, though. But the general direction of EMC is Linux & Windows because these two dominate the market.

_digioso wrote: Enterprise customers still have most of their business critical platforms on UNIX based plattforms. Our Pre-Sales guy put it that way: 90% of EMCs customers are middle-sized companies. These of course have more or less only Linux & Windows.

I can't say what current deployment of NetWorker is as I do not have insight into that, but I suspect your pre-sales guy got something wrong.  There is no doubt EMC will support UNIX platforms - these are clients.  What your guy might have said was only server platform direction change.  I personally run NW on HPUX ia64, AIX and Linux.  HPUX ia64 is most stable of them all and I'm almost sure that couple of years ago Solaris would be even more stable in respect to NW operations.  All my small servers are Linux and the only reason why big ones are not on Linux is that big UNIX brothers are more powerful at this point.  However, when you check Gartner (or any other analyst) you see that Intel is leading the game and most of the progress happens there.  Not sure what Oracle and HP plans are, but in UNIX world IBM did most of the progress in recent years - according to Gartner again. I'm quite sure I will feel comfortable with Linux in couple of year when it comes to heavy duty server.  Actually, if EMC would distribute their load and database around cluster of nodes (creating application HA setup), I could use it already today.  Is your pre-sales guy coming from EMC?

Well, you did say that, didn't you?  You said:

Solaris (and Unix in general !) support will most likely more or less cease end of 2016.

If you wish to change that now and restrict that only to Solaris x86, them I'm surprised they will keep the support for this so long (unless they plan to kill SPARC and focus on x86 platform) due to its market share which has always been very very low.  If any of the big UNIX names would be able within next two years to come with new processor that would offer new possibilities OS wise (and application wise), it might stop decline of UNIX - otherwise you will just see it going down more and more (both Gartner and IDC has recently papers on that subject as well). Whatever happens, even if the ball starts rolling by mid of this decade, I doubt it will reach its destination before the end of this decade.  This leaves more than enough time to adopt. Those who went for NW (for server or NMC) and Solarix x86 didn't pay attention to reality of market in the first place.