As environments grow, it becomes increasingly more difficult, expensive, and inefficient to perform backups to local media. Many backup applications will allow you to perform a backup over the network but will limit you to a single backup location or device. This “wagon-wheel” approach can create lengthy backup windows and a single-point-of-failure because you are not utilizing all available hardware resources.

SBAdmin provides a distributive network backup approach which allows all AIX, Linux, and Solaris client systems to also act as a backup server. There is no limit to the number of backup servers that may be configured, which allows you to run network backups in parallel, utilize multiple backup hardware resources, and reduce backup windows.

When using SBAdmin, all systems are managed from a single, centralized, intuitive interface. Unlike other network backup products, the administrator need not be the backup server. Instead, any client system may be configured as a backup server to store its own backups or backups from any other configured client.

It is also possible to perform system backups to and system recoveries from a mounted NFS share (supported with Network Edition and Workstation Edition). When utilizing this feature, the storage media (the NFS share) will appear local to the client, but will actually exist on a NFS server accessible over the network. No SBAdmin software is necessary on the remote NFS server.