East MI Storage & High Availability User Group
Meeting Notes 18Aug10
 

Meeting Started 11:15am
 
Topics Discussed:
 

• Craig Leiss started out meeting by reviewing agenda:
  • Stressed importance of group discussion for getting the most out of the meeting.
  • Went around the room for introductions (name, current role, Symantec products in use, what do you expect to get from the meeting)
  • Next meeting is scheduled for November 10th on the west side of the state
    • Can Symantec provide web services (WebX, ect.) for this meeting for those who cannot travel and attend in person?
    • Bryan Yakel stated that Steelcase has volunteered to host the November meeting and that representative from Amway has volunteered to do a presentation on PureDisk.

 
Lunch break @ 11:30am
 

• Philp Avery from Dewpoint presentation regarding backup and recovery for State of Michigan:
  • Current staff size for backup and recovery at State of Mich is seven with one dedicated to research and test
  • Have already tested NetBackup version 7.0.1 w/ no problems.
  • When Dewpoint was hired in 2007, the success rate of backups was 63 percent and no formal SLA.
  • In 2009 Backup and Recovery was the third largest sector of IT and growing
  • Regulations call for ability to do a complete restore within 24 hours.
  • Understanding Backups:
    • Need to review what is and should be backed up
    • Ability to deal with shrinking backup windows
  • Cost of doing it wrong:
    • In 2008 IBM was fined $900k for data loss through failed backups (State of Texas).
    • 82 percent of companies that encounter complete data loss end up going out of business.
  • Currently at State of Michigan:
    • 99.5 percent backup success rate.
    • Backing up between 600 – 2600 clients
    • 40,000 backup jobs per week
    • Backups cover over 6Pb of storage.
    • Currently have eleven master servers.
    • Has a rolling 30 day backup retention policy
  • Beginning to use PureDisk and finding a reduction in the backup storage footprint by more than 10:1.
  • Recommend the need to review your environment every six months to make sure you are doing the right thing.
  • Discussion on deduplication:
    • Talk around the room on who is using it..
    • Some seeing twenty percent reduction in backup sizes…. Based on data type.
    • Previously Windows registries did not dedup but this has been corrected with version 7.0.1.
    • Discussion on dedup to tape on why this is not possible (restore would take too long do to spread of data)
    • Discussion on different dedup providers which include (FalconStore, Quantum, DataDomain…)
    • Discussion on different dedup types which include source and target.
  • NetBackup 7 allows you to extend retention either on a particular image or a whole tape.  This good for data holds, etc.
  • Discussion on VMWare backups:
    • VStorage API replaces the use of VCB.
    • Expected speed of VCB / VStorage API backups is 20 – 80Mb/s
    • No longer required to backup to disk first with VStorage API as you did with VCB..
      • It is recommended to still backup to disk first as you want to be able to remove the VM snapshot as soon as possible.
  • State of Michigan not using BMR due to security concerns.
• Bryan Yakel from Symantec presentation on Veritas Operations Services (VOS):
  • This can be found online at: http://vos.symantec.com
  • VOS can provide the following:
    • Real-time patch notifications.
    • Actionable error reports.
    • Server comparison reports
    • General check list for upgrades from X to Y.
    • Documentation for all Symantec productions is available from here.
  • NetBackup expected to be added to VOS by the end of this year.
  • Q&A:
    • Recommendation was made by the user group to make a modification to VOS so that multiple user IDs can be tied together so that they can see the same servers / info… similar to how licensing site works.
    • Statement made that improved licensing reports needed online..  hard to decipher which licenses are active after many years of renewals.
    • Discussion on capacity based versus client based licensing models.. Does it make sense to go to capacity based model:
      • If lots if data and low client count then maybe so..
      • If not so much data and high client count then maybe not..
    • Comment from group member regarding VMS client backups do not work after client is upgraded to NBU 6.5.5.  No one else encountered problem and was recommended to contact support.
    • Question regarding what Command Central is..: (System that IDs what you have in your storage environment…. i.e-  HBAs, Switches, Applications, Disks, etc.)
• Comment was made by group member that a demonstration / discussion on BMR would still be nice to have at one of the upcoming group meetings.
• Meeting finished at 1:55pm; Craig Leiss raffled off Symantec gifts.