Operational Help

/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}It wasn’t too many years ago that NetBackup was sold to companies who were replacing cobbled together scripts that did local backup to local tape drives.

Times have changed a lot since then.

Customers who were once thrilled to replace a ton of individual backup scriptswith a standard automatic solution are now are looking for solutions that takethis to the next level. The question of the day is "How can we manage manyNetBackup servers, each of which back up hundreds or thousands of uniqueclients?" Even after post merger consolidations, there are many large customersthat have dozens and dozens of backup servers, sometimes even hundreds, backing up petabytes of data. Oneanswer to making operations simpler is NetBackup Operations Manager (NOM). This free component of NetBackup allows you tomonitor and manage more than one NetBackup server, across multiple versionsanywhere in your enterprise -- all without making your administrator installanother agent or management console on the desktop.

Neatstuff.

Thisbrings me to the actual news item. We have been working on making NOM morescalable for a few years now. When we released the 6.5 version of NetBackup weannounced that NOM supported monitoring 40 NetBackup servers. With our latest6.5.2 release we have increased this by 50% to 60. See the October revision ofthe "NetBackup6.5 Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide" for more details. The good news is that we aren't done yet. More improvements are already being worked on.

Sohow does this help operations really?

Thisweek I talked to a large enterprise with four huge data centers and a few smaller remote sites. They currentlyhave a work flow that looks like this. Operator looks at a daily report forall media problems across their enterprise. They log into each server to resolve each problem individually.Often the resolution is that they run a command with lots of complex switches toremedy the issue. The new work flow looks like this. Get an email alert whenthere is a media problem. Log into NOM, select the media (possibly on manyservers) and with one click remedy the issue.

Soundslike a better work flow to me. :)

Tim Burlowski
Technical Product Manager
Symantec