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 the 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.