Zmanda, Inc. introduced recently the first business-ready open source backup solution: the Zmanda Network is a suite of enterprise-ready software and services based on the popular Amanda open source data backup and recovery technology. Today we are very happy to feature a mini-interview with Zmanda’s CEO, Chander Kant.1. What are the software/feature differences between the community and the enterprise Amanda edition?
Chander Kant: The difference between Community edition and Enterprise Edition are in:
– Simplicity of installation and configuration.
* Enterprise Edition provides special utilities (amserverconfig and amaddclient) that create configuration settings for any new Amanda installation and make it easy to add new clients.
– Flexible enterprise-grade security.
* In addition to symmetric encryption provided by Amanda Community Edition, the Amanda Enterprise Edition also supports asymmetric
encryption schema via gpg.
– Support for ACLs and extended attributes so Amanda Enterprise Edition would recover a file with the finest level of permissions.
– Scalability of supported environment.
* Amanda Enterprise Edition provides support for VERY LARGE backup images (up to 2 to the power of 64 bytes).
– Better protection of enterprise environments.
* Amanda Enterprise Edition can backup files with any characters in a file name (including spaces).
– Enterprise Edition can run multiple backups of the same file systems per day so customers can have more granular Recovery Point Objectives.
For example, in case of emergency, a file server could be recovered to a state not 24 hours ago, but only 4 hours ago (depends on how many
backups per day you want for that server).
2. What kind of changes/additions you had to make over the original Amanda code?
Chander Kant: Zmanda was a driving force behind Amanda Community Edition version 2.5. We have changed at least 20% of code between Amanda 2.4 and Amanda 2.5. Following page goes over the enhancements done in Amanda 2.5.
3. How is the indemnification offer against intellectual property infringement works exactly for the customers?
Chander Kant: Zmanda has 100% confidence in the integrity of the Amanda code. For customers who have at least 50 Amanda clients we provide an optional
indemnification. If a customer is sued for intellectual property infringement in Amanda code, Zmanda will provide legal defense and financial support for that customer.
4. What new features users should expect on the next stable version of Amanda?
Chander Kant: The next release of Amanda will be focused on: – Further simplification of administration. For example, we will provide
a web-based GUI for Amanda so a system admin could manage Amanda installation remotely.
– native client for Windows
– an application API so it will be easy to use Amanda for backup of applications such as MySQL & SugarCRM
5. Are there any efforts to port Amanda to also work with PostgreSQL, or mySQL is the database of choice?
Chander Kant: – Broader application and database integration is an important part of Zmanda’s product strategy. We are working on an open application API
which will make it easier to integrate Amanda with applications such as MySQL & PostgreSQL.
We do have a very close relationship with MySQL, and are working with their engineers to create a seamless database hot-backup solution.
6. How Amanda compares to other Unix backup and recovery applications, feature-wise?
Chander Kant: Attached document provides detailed overview of Amanda functionality in
comparison to incumbents, but basically:
– Amanda provides the same core functionality as incumbents
– Amanda is THE ONLY backup solution that allows to recover data without vendor’s software
– Amanda media provides instructions how to recover data from media without Amanda in plain English text (of course there will be no key for
encrypted data)
– Amanda has a unique scheduler that simplifies life of a system administrator.
7. Are there any plans for a graphical multi-platform Amanda client?
Chander Kant: Zmanda is working on a web based graphical interface to configure, manage and monitor various data protection technologies. This intuitive
interface will make managing Amanda dramatically easy.This multi-platform management console is planned with the next major Amanda
release.
Amanda is a good project, and it is good to see support for it.
Amanda is a great backup but it is a challenge to configure it for the first time. It is good that finally somebody is thinking about simplicity of initial configuration. After you install Amanda though, it runs lights out.
hi,
i’m using backuppc.sf.net and i’m very happy with it. i’m using it for private purposes as well as for different companies of the size of 20 to 150 employees.
i run backups of linux and bsd boxen, windows and osx desktops. it’s simple (for my private backups i use the default configuration files), it has remote administration _and_ remote restore by using a browser and it’s secure (you can do backups over ssh).
like *amanda, it can’t do hot backups of databases. if you want to do that, you’d have to stop the database engine with a pre-script, than backup the thing and restart the enginge with a post-script.
According to me Bacula is alot more business-ready than Amanda & derivates.
I ain’t saying Amanda is bad, ofcourse not. But we provide linux services & installations and when it comes down to real business requirements from customers that want to use Open Source software, Bacula seems to be the best product. It supports alot of features that are still in the wishlist of Amanda. Just check it out at http://www.bacula.org and read the featurelist, it’s huge !
Bacula works pretty well. I’ve used Bacula internally, and Veritas externally for an off-site backup, and in many ways Bacula is probably better to set up and use – and cheaper. It is pretty feature complete as well.
I’m sure there are many fans of both Amanda and Bacula.
The big difference though is that a new company, Zmanda, with a very skilled development team, is committed to driving Amanda development and support. They have already made a huge contribution to the recent Amanda Community release V2.5, adding enhancements in stability and security. I’m betting that they will continue to drive the features that users really want.