SBAdmin--or System Backup Administrator--is the flagship offering from Storix; a backup and recovery platform targeted primarily to Linux and AIX machines. The platform is offered in multiple flavors differing primarily in scale; including the feature limited Desktop edition, for non-commercial users on a single system; the Workstation edition, targeted to single systems or multiple systems that don't share network resources; and finally the Network Administrator version, which allows for the centralized management of backup jobs among network machines. In the Network Administrator version in particular, each machine on the network can be a client (to be backed up from) or a server (to be backed up to) or both, with the central console managing the backup jobs between them and monitoring their status.

A key feature of the SBAdmin platform is its ability to perform full system recovery of data to machines with differing hardware from the original; facilitating operations such as the cloning or replication of machines without having to reinstall the O/S and applications individually on new gear. Called Adaptable System Recovery (ASR) by the vendor, the technology allows for restores that adapt the backed up data to the hardware detected during installation. If differences (between the backup and newly detected hardware) are detected that require intervention, the software can make recommendations to the user for the completion of the restoration, such as the selection of new disks or automated shrinking of file systems. In addition to migrating a backup to new hardware, the backup can be modified when restored to the same machine as well; facilitating the migration of storage allocations on the machine (migrating from disk partitions to Logical Volumes or Software RAID; moving partitions to different disks; slitting a single FS into multiple systems, etc.).

Though targeted primarily to Linux and AIX machines, the vendor notes that Windows or Mac OS X based backups are also optionally possible in the Network Administrator version; a process that is facilitated by the product's ability to backup data exposed via the SMB protocol. Such data is backed up by first moving the SMB data temporarily to a Linux SMB host and then backing it up from there (as an additional feature, the data can then be restored to Linux or AIX file systems, if desired). Full system recoveries as described above, however, are not available for SMB-based backups.

Other features include optional backup encryption (data is encrypted at the client before it is transmitted over the network, with options to limit the backup to being read only by the original machine or a machine with the proper encryption keys installed), the ability to perform live backups of point-in-time data, via Split-Mirror-Backups on AIX systems and Snapshot Logical Volumes on Linux; and an optional Oracle Database Backup feature integrating Oracle database backups with the SBAdmin interface.

The latest enhancement to SBAdmin is its support for integration with IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager. With this enhancement, SBAdmin can write directly to TSM and allows TSM users to perform data recoveries to the same or different hardware, as described above. TSM integration is expected to be available before the end of the third quarter.

SBAdmin is available now, with pricing ranging from $99 for the desktop version to $895 for the Network Administrator version (plus $395 for additional backup client/server licenses).

Visit the Storix Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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