Legato User forums

Drove my happy arse up to denver this morning for the Legato user forum, not super impressed but I did walk away with the answers to the questions I had.

For those who are not aware, Legato offers a range of high availability and data management / backup / recovery software. Recently acquired by EMC they apparently have been making some rather huge changes (unfortunately none that I have noticed on the basic support side but oh well). I ranted about the lack of skilled support representatives and mentioned that they need to get rid of the scripts and train the support staff in the ways of solving problems, kicked around some questions about the new Snap modules (nifty snapshot management for some of the more popular SAN racks like the Clarion, etc.), ate some pastries, drank much coffee and skee-daddled.

I didnt really pull much from a technical standpoint out of this, other than a few best practice tip's in dealing with server parallelism vs. device sessions but all in all it wasnt bad, I even got a free hat. I must say I walked in with the plan that the conference would be almost purely marketing so I wasnt let down to find out that it was indeed mostly marketing, although I did manage to chat about some logistic issues and improvements with other users.

As far as Legato Networker goes, I love the product, find it to work amazingly well and would deem it worth the cost. Some of the licensing can get confusing at times when adding modules / clients / etc. but all in all it isn't too bad to roll out. Obvious downsides are the lack of client modules for BSD, with the upside being that backup to disk is supported with amazing results and media management (although somewhat confusing at first) is much more accurate than the other products we use / have used.

You can always check em out for yourself at www.legato.com