Re: Another Opinion
Your information is outdated as far as APIs, security and nbdeployutil.
We have published REST APIs, but as you said were traditionally built on RPC. More important is that RPC has been a great solution over the years and has been heavily used by our customers, but we have adopted REST as it has become more popular.
I think this is a valid statement, "REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different."
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/09/understanding-rest-and-rpc-for-http-apis/
As far as security, we doubled downed on our communications hardening by adding secure comms. "NetBackup uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol for host communication where each host needs to present its security certificate and validate the peer host's certificate against the Certificate Authority (CA) certificate." This gives you data encryption in flight between all clients, media servers, MSDP, Master, etc...
We also have the option of data encryption at rest on MSDP. That encryption can take place at the client or the Media Server.
Our appliances use Symantec CSP which is what is used in about 40% of ATMs. For years we have offered a $5000 prize at Blackhat for anyone who could capture a flag on our appliances. To date no flags have ever been captured and we have never had to pay out.
The NetBackup Cryptographic Module is FIPS 140-2 validated.
As for the catalog upgrades, if we were still running the same catalog over 31 years I would have to question our sanity. Obviously as we protect more data we need to improve performance, scalability, protection and also provide value back to the business. Today our ability to provide metadata about the data that is protected allows you to identify critical data, obsolete data, orphaned and stale data. Without that information and being able to visualize your data you can never properly determine your SLAs and therefor properly plan. NetBackup Admins can provide a goldmine of value back to the business beyond just data protection.
I'm not here to discuss competitors, but the two you mentioned do not have the same full breadth of data protection capabilities for so many workloads available through NetBackup Appliances. No offense, but you sound about 4-5 years behind on your info. NetBackup outperforms and successfuly competes head to head with much more modern competitors than the ones you have mentioned.