Operating Systems

Review by Marcel Gagné

Backups remain one of the most mundane tasks in the systems administrator's list of duties. For the most part, there's nothing exciting about the process and the excitement that does occasionally follow (restoring that lost file) is something we would all like to avoid. Nevertheless, backups are an absolute necessity. Having a reliable process that makes it easy to recover lost information is the only way to make friends when the inevitable happens. After all, it isn't a question of whether you backed up, but whether you can restore.

With this view of the backup and restore life, I decided to look at Arkeia Corporation (formerly Knox Software) flagship product, Arkeia (version 5.0.16). With an ultra-modern graphical user interface, Arkeia looks like it is capable of far more than mere backups, but that is indeed its job.

Before I share my Arkeia experience with you, I'd like to say that Arkeia makes it relatively easy to take their product out for a test drive. For starters, a full-featured download is available from the Web site, which should work fine on your single SCSI tape drive system. Why, you might wonder, have I emphasized single SCSI tape drives? Well, Arkeia also supports robotic tape libraries or jukeboxes as they are sometimes called. Should you wish to try Arkeia with one of these units, you will need to contact Arkeia for a special evaluation license.

Installation and configuration

Depending on your system's architecture and operating system release, you may be able to install a simple packaged version of Arkeia. Arkeia is available for many different operating systems including AIX, Sun, NetWare, and others. In the Linux world, you'll find RPMs for Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE, as well as Debian and Slackware packages. There are also tarred and gzipped binary distributions should your particular release not be available. Even if you do follow that route, it is all extremely simple. Extract the files, run the install script, and that is pretty much it.

The default installation places all the Arkeia files in /opt/arkeia. As part of the installation, the Arkeia deamons are automatically started for you. Installing the client-only systems is just as easy. In fact, what differentiates a client from a server installation is a simple configuration file, namely /opt/arkeia/arkeiad/admin.cfg. If the machine on which you install is going to be nothing more than a client, simply enter the server's name here, and your client configuration is complete.

It is possible to run Arkeia from the command line (using the arkc command-line interface), but part of what makes this package attractive is its innovative graphical interface. This is the xarkeia command, and it is from that point of view that I approached this review.

Running Arkeia

While getting Arkeia installed is pretty much a cakewalk, getting your first backup out of it can be a little intimidating at first. The GUI wins the award for out and out coolness factor, but behind the glitz, flash, and pizzazz of the GUI, there lurks a serious and somewhat picky backup utility.

I say that because there's a lot to do before you can actually get going. You must configure your drive (which is helped a lot by the drive detection utility — for those trying to configure a jukebox, this is an essential facility). Then, you need to create a drivepack and assign one or more of your drives to the drivepack. After this, it is time to create one or more tape pools after which you create tapes (specifying type, rotation, etc.) that you assign to the pool(s). What follows is a definition of a savepack, which is essentially a selection of directories and files located on client machines.

Once you get the hang of it, the whole process becomes pretty transparent, but the initial setup and the concepts associated with them can be daunting. On a small network like mine with a single server and a couple of clients, this seemed a bit like overkill. However, if you think about it a little, it makes sense. Arkeia is designed to be a mission critical application with the enterprise in mind — the design enforces strict tape rotation and good backup practices.

Speed Bumps on the Road to Arkeia

When I started the review, I intended only to try Arkeia on my own system with a couple of Linux clients. As luck would have it, however, I found myself in a situation where I had the opportunity to evaluate Arkeia in a large-scale environment with multiple operating systems at play. Furthermore, aside from my simple, single SCSI tape drive, I had access to a 20-tape StorageTek unit with large capacity LTO drives. I couldn't have been more excited. That's also where I ran into my first problems.

While it appeared that my jukebox was recognized, the drives were not. Arkeia provided me with a 30-day temporary license for the jukebox — as I mentioned earlier, the basic installation only supports single drives — and I was ready to go. Time passed . . . too much time, in fact. Eventually, after trying several variations of configuring this jukebox, I had gone as far as I could without additional help.

The only error message I had to go on was "arkvlib is not running". This seemed odd because a "ps ax | grep arkvlib" told me the process was running when I started xarkeia. Unfortunately, the process would die as soon as I started my backup. I took advantage of my free installation tech support to open a call. The tech who responded told me to run a diagnostic command to generate troubleshooting information and then send him the report. It turned out that I hadn't used the correct jukebox definition. That was fine, but after correcting this, I received another equally cryptic error message. Once again, I ran the diag program, submitted it to tech support and discovered that I hadn't created my tapes (despite their appearance in my jukebox's list). Eventually, I had the whole mess sorted out, but I did feel that the error messages were far from useful and that some better end-user diagnostics would have been extremely helpful.

That said, the tech support I received was fantastic. At no point did I let them know that I was reviewing their product, yet their responses to my questions was quick and helpful.

Backups at last

Finally, I had a working jukebox and tape drives. I sat down and create all 18 tapes in the unit, set up some pools, savepacks, and so on. Then, I set up a handful of client systems and started my first backup. Everything was smooth as silk. I picked a file somewhere in the backup, deleted it from my system, then restored it without a hitch. All this in a friendly point-and-click interface.

Arkeia also provides a nice interface for managing scheduled backups. Once again, this is a point-and-click process. You begin by selecting the periodic backup menu, from which you define what kind of a backup you want; whether it will be daily, weekly, or on specific days. This is where everything you've learned about Arkeia's methods pays off. You select a savepack, a drivepack, a pool (all of which you created earlier), whether the backup is full or incremental, and how long it is valid for. This last parameter lets Arkeia determine whether it will allow a tape in the pool to be reused before a certain amount of time has expired.

An easy-to-use calendar GUI shows you the days on which backups will run. Arkeia then creates and stores extensive logs to keep you up to date about what happened and when. Once a backup is underway, a speedometer-like display provides you with a means of analyzing both physical media and network throughput.

Conclusion

Running Arkeia in an enterprise environment has certainly made a believer out of me. This is a sophisticated and powerful backup solution. It works well, runs well, and delivers excellent results. It even looks good doing it (assuming you are running the GUI, of course). In terms of its capabilities as an enterprise backup solution, I am very impressed. Furthermore, the fact that Arkeia Corporation is willing to offer free pre-purchase installation support for 30 days is fantastic. This is a trial package that can't be beat.

Along with my praise, I must also express what I see as a weakness in the product. The problem is the initial strangeness a new admin is likely to experience. The interface could certainly be more intuitive, as cool as it is. Tooltips are available for some of the buttons, but not others. Some functions are hidden behind pop-up menus that are not necessarily evident. There is, however, context-sensitive help available for all screens, which you can bring up by pressing the question mark icon in the corner control center. The PDF documentation is clear and easy to understand (once you get used to the concepts and terminology). The only drawback for me was the lack of troubleshooting information.

So, how much will this wonder of backup and restore cost you? Pricing varies a great deal depending on your environment, the number of machines you are looking to back up, the type of hardware you are using, and the level of support you would like to enjoy. It can run from just a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. It can also cost you nothing.

Arkeia offers a little something they call Arkeia Light, a free version of the same product but with support for only one Linux server, one tape drive, and two clients (either Linux or Windows) in either a personal or commercial environment. This quote from the Arkeia Web site brings joy to my Linux-geek heart:

Arkeia Corp. believes that diversity and choice promote a healthy, robust and dynamic software industry. Although market competition among commercial vendors encourages innovation, the open source movement has also made significant contributions to the software industry by creating free, high quality software such as Linux. To acknowledge the contribution of thousands of Linux users who have donated time and expertise toward the goal of making Linux a viable alternative OS, Arkeia Corp. has made a full version of Arkeia available to Linux users at no cost for personal or commercial use.

Surf on over to Arkeia and check it out. You will be glad you did.

Marcel Gagné lives in Mississauga, Ontario. He is the author of Linux System Administration: A User's Guide from Addison Wesley and has just completed his latest book , Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (available in August). In real life, he is president of Salmar Consulting Inc., a systems integration and network consulting firm. He loves Linux and all flavors of UNIX and will even admit it in public. He can be reached via e-mail at mggagne@salmar.com. You can discover lots of other things from his Web site at http://www.marcelgagne.com/.