I have been using Veritas Netbackup under Solaris (server) with solaris, NT and Linux clients at work and it is a large, complex, and difficult to set up package, with quirks. However it works extremely well for very large setups once setup the overhead is worth it (tape management, restore convenience).
I don't see anything unreasonable about network backup software "running as root" and "opening a port up", in fact I would expect it to do that! The software comes with a plethora of documentation, both printed and in PDF format with the box and on the web, not too mention the "help" pages available on the java admin console, and mailing list archives detailing scripted extensions, reporting, various tricky performance tuning issues etc.. ObDebian : the NetBackup4.5 client is not officially supported for debian Linux AFAIK but works perfectly under deb/unstable if you find and install libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1_2.91.66-4.deb > I didn't like Veritas' software at all -- it worked (moderately) under > Linux by running as root and opening a port up. There was little > documentation at all, and absolutely nothing about its security. > > That scares me. > > -Ed >