Bocada Enterprise

The core product offering from Bocada, Bocada Enterprise provides the ability to collect and report on data from multiple, heterogeneous backup platforms. The product is targeted to admins, compliance officers, etc. as a means to identify potential shortcomings in an organization's data protection methodologies, prove data protection compliance, monitor overall data protection operations, etc.

The product itself is installed on a central Windows 2000/2003 server. Agentless technologies allow it to collect metadata information pertaining to the actions of multiple backup and storage management platforms--including IBM TSM, NetBackup/Backup Exec, NetWorker, ARCserve, OpenView Storage Data Protector, Data Protection Manager, Oracle RMAN, and ACSLS Manager--without requiring the installation of agents on the backup servers themselves. Information is collected from these systems and stored in an SQL Server database, where it can be accessed through Web based reports, reports generated in external file formats (PDF, Excel, Word), or directly by accessing the SQL data natively (Bocada provides documentation of the SQL database information). The vendor notes that the product is not designed for real-time monitoring of backup operations; though scripts can conceivably be built by the customer to push collected data from the SQL DB to 3rd party management/alerting platforms.

Monitored servers can be located locally or remotely (WAN); as long as the backup system that is being monitored itself has access to the remote server (I.E., the backup server must be accessible within the network and under the command of supported backup software). The vendor states that Bocada Enterprise in general supports all the platforms for deployment of the monitored backup software that the backup software itself supports; in other words, the supported backup systems can themselves be deployed on any platform for which they are designed (in general).

Features include:

- Monitoring and notification of the data collection/reporting operations of the product; including the ability to send E-mail alerts with embedded URLs that link to HTML versions of reports

- A modular architecture allowing for the inclusion of new modules as they are developed. Among the available modules is a "Media Module" with the ability to assess drive and library utilization, capacity, health and occupancy for TSM, NetBackup, and NetWorker (the occupancy report, in particular, identifies the amount of capacity required to support current policies by tracking the amount of copies stored on both disk and tape); and a new plug-in that supports the collection of data via the reading of CSV files (so Bocada can conceivably support any backup platform that itself can publish job info as CSV files).

Bocada Enterprise is available now. Contact Bocada for further information.