I haven't looked at Harbor for MANY years. Years ago it was a pretty good product, I haven't kept up with its evolution. And as I recall it was more like TSM than Legato is. But the biggest thing it has that I know is different from TSM is the ability to compare 2 files from different clients and keep only 1 copy on the server when the two files are the same. That is pretty neat technology.
BUT, try to think logically about what that really buys you in your environment. I did an analysis of our client data here in a review of a different product that offers that feature, and I found that feature wouldn't really buy us much. We support 7 different client platforms, but the majority of them are Win2K. The Win2K code occupies less than 300MB on the client. Office XP takes another 200+MB. We use client compression, so when that data is transferred to the server, it occupies maybe 200MB. And that is for clients that may occupy 2 GB to 200 GB on the server, and our clients are growing larger and larger every year, with unique data. Anyway, I actually did an analysis of our data, and the best I could figure, duplicate data accounted for only about 10% of our total back end tape storage. And the bigger your clients are, the less the duplicates matter. It might be more important to somebody who was backing up 1000 identical desktops, but ours aren't identical. As for the other stuff: "periodic backup consolidations to re-organize data to speed restore" = TSM collocation And you don't have to do consolidations to get it, you can do it at backup time. "... and free up storage space. " = TSM reclamation It's always been in the product It is unlikely that you will save significant tape or $ moving to another mainframe-based backup product. If you want to save mainframe disk and tape, your best bet would be to move to TSM on an AIX server (depending on the size of your clients, a WIn2K server might do). You get the same great product, terrific performance (as an ex-mainframer I can tell you the performance on AIX is incredible - wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself), and NO conversion costs for your clients. You won't have to change ANYTHING on the client end! Just my opinion... Wanda Prather -----Original Message----- From: Shannon Bach [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 9:22 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Tantia Harbor Backup? Currently our TSM server is on MVS OS/390 v 2.10, and we backup around 50 clients of various platforms. I personally prefer having TSM on the mainframe, while other servers seem to crash around me everyday, the mainframe is only platform in our company that has NEVER CRASHED. But as the clients servers disk storage keeps on getting larger and larger, TSM does use extensive resources(tapes, DASD) etc. Management is considering different storage solutions before investing more resources in our current solution. A vendor from Beta Systems was here yesterday pushing a product called Tantia Harbor Backup. Evidently it makes optimal use of storage media by incorporating such features as an automatic file redundancy checker (AFRC), automatic data classification, and periodic backup consolidations to re-organize data to speed restore and free up storage space. It is currently used on mainframes although they have just released a server version for NT's. As I have never heard anything about this product before I was wondering if anyone else on this list has. Thank you in advance. Shannon Bach Madison Gas & Electric Co. Operations Analyst - Data Center Services Office 608-252-7260 Fax 608-252-7098 e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
