A typical server environment consists of the main servers, drive arrays (which may or may not be directly attached to their respective servers), and disk- and tape-based backup servers. The most common IT assets are typically: patch panel, switches, secondary UPS, switch box, monitor and keyboard, blade servers, drive arrays and tape systems.
I don't know if any of you have noticed but the first fiscal quarter of this year has been pretty bad for server sales. It doesn’t matter what the pundits say, however, it is important for all of us to save money, cut costs – but absolutely not at the expense of our backup.
Backup Exec 12.5 released an Agent for Enterprise Vault, which is designed to offer complete protection for Enterprise Vault 7.5 implementations. When Enterprise Vault 8.0 was released, architectural changes in EV 8.0 made the Backup Exec 12.5 Agent for Enterprise Vault unable to automatically protect all aspects of Enterprise Vault.
There are a number of fixes around GRT including up to a 90% decrease in the time taken to run an incremental GRT backup. Please see the following technote which provides links to and details around the changes and fixes in SP2
I know I keep banging on about this but it really does bother me that we are not adequately protecting Active Directory (AD) as the primary directory service in Windows. Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint all depend on efficient backup and quick recovery of AD.
The bottom line is that IT administration is not as simple as it was a few years ago. In fact, keeping your business data for critical applications protected is pretty tricky. Backing up, that’s not the tricky bit, is it? Backing stuff up, on the face of it, is really easy.
Protecting the VMware environment has its own unique set of data protection challenges. There are basically three ways to protect VMware: the guest OS method, the console backup method and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) method. The guest OS method treats each virtual machine as a standalone server and backups take place as usual as if the virtual is physical server.
