You might have had a really (really) good backup strategy 2 or 3 years ago, but does it stack up today? Every vendor you’ve ever heard about is always banging on about backup and recovery being even more tricky than it was yesterday; and how it is now ever more challenging than it ever was, and, frankly it was pretty trick then … what with data growth going crazy, sprawling physical and virtualised environments, shrinking, nay, shrunk backup windows (what’s backup window?), and escalating storage management costs.

Gosh, haven’t we heard it all before? But, it is certainly true that the age old conventional backup solutions have not kept up with the data protection requirements, as well as the growth in data itself forcing substantial investments in hardware and dramatically increased administrator workload.

You might already have a good data backup strategy in place. But if your server hardware were lost or your building suddenly off limits,...

We do our anual DR tests, and now we are looking to step them up a bit.  Might be nice to see what others do or dont do in this arena. 

We have a DR box that is on a seperate network.  We can take that box build it as a master server and import our catalog from NBU 6.5.3.  We can then patch that into our library via fiber single path slowness, combined with the old leftover of a DR box we should have our critical restore done within 24 hours.  

In a true DR scenario where our primary DC was gone.  I would probably more than likely promote our media server to a master server then do the catalog import piece.  I have not done this since the new and improved 6.5 way of doing things with that small catalog file that i get emailed daily to my inbox.  Have others ?  Does it take long?  Realizing we all have different size catalogs, but in general have you had sucess.  Please add any thoughts...

Recently I had all 3 of my PureDisk environments giving me storage problems due to internal/external causes.

First one was relatively simple, it's a 6.2.2 all-in-one node and it ran out of disk space for /Storage - 95% full.

The storage array was not a SAN but a dedicated one.
Challenging task with this was finding out how to order physical disks and finding a resource to put the disks in the array.

Array was a 12-slots one, with 6 slots occupied with 300GB disks.
Once the new 6 disks were put in, the engineer rebooted PureDisk server with a HP CD loaded, to connect to the array and create a single 1.5TB RAID5 virtual LUN, then the server's been rebooted again for PDOS to start.

When I started Yast2 interface, it automatically picked up the new LUN, and I simply added the new LUN in the LVM volume group - this task instantly grew the xfs filesystem as well, and suddenly I had 49% full /Storage filesystem, happy.

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When a fire broke out at the main campus building at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, the school’s IT team charged in right behind firefighters to shut down servers and cover them with heavy tarps. All of the university’s data was saved, but the experience prompted the IT team to re-evaluate its data management and backup operations. Working with Symantec, Our Lady of the Lake University has reduced by half the amount of administrative time it spends on backups and increased backup speeds by up to 40 percent.

Even before the fire hit, Darrell Hoberer, the university’s network/system administrator, had a standing goal to back up every file on his servers every night, but with 1.5 terabytes of data growing at about 15 percent per year, that wasn’t becoming impossible. Data growth was coming from a heterogeneous mix of...