Kristine and I here at Symantec spoke with Jerome of DCIG blogging fame a few weeks ago. It was a good discussion and he turned around and decided to blog about it on his DCIG blog. The main points we agreed on during our conversations? CDP is in a very different place than it was a few years ago and it NEEDS to be integrated in to an existing backup product. Read the rest here and if you're really excited check out NetBackup RealTime.
Thought these were fun. Yes they are propaganda but it's a good way to describe to a non-IT person what Symantec (or you) do with infrastructure software.
If you are planning to implements SLPs or already have, becoming familiar with the suggestions in the documents will allow you to both tune your systems for your workload and gain insight into the current state of your lifecycles.
If you aren't familiar with Storage Lifecycle Policies, also known as SLP's, they are one of the more innovative approaches I've seen in the last few years for to allow a user to describe a life cycle for a backup data, without creating complex nests of overlapping schedules. If you aren't familiar with SLPs you can read more in the white paper entitled, “...
I really like comparing personal backup to enterprise backup. When I first started working in the world of storage my head was swimming with tape drives, storage arrays and the ridiculous number of acronyms our industry loves to use. I didn't even back things up at home. So to dive in to my new job I went out and built a RedHat machine and installed the NetBackup 5.1 beta so I could start protecting my other 2 machines. Probably over kill but it let me play around and learn the product. Eventually I eased up and started using Norton 360 with a portable hard drive. This was way more simple to use and I've actually had it save me a couple of times recently when I was trying out the Windows 7 beta's and deleted the wrong partition (ops, no more 500GB media drive). I slept a little better at night knowing that I had a second copy of my data. And growing up in the digital age, I don't have a single picture, video or music file that is not on a machine.
from last one year, I have seen lots of folks (with in and outside organization) asking me about NODirectSDR registry entry or I have suggested them to use it to resolve lots of problems with flashbackup for windows policy type backups. I will get some time to post an article on that and usage info. I will update the link here as well.
Thanks,
Praveen
Yesterday I was talking with a Symantec user about the decisions you have to make when picking how to recover from a failure. Like most companies they had a whole slew of options from clustering and high-availability, to replication, snapshots and tape. Most people we talk with have some idea of the amount of time they can tolerate to get back up from a failure and the amount of data they are willing to lose but these two things (time and data lost) are more related than most people think and this user especially understood that...particularly when it comes to applications. It really is one of the biggest problems applications have when you try to back them up. They have to be stopped or paused since some data may be in memory or logs that haven't been fully written to disk. So most backup apps have a "hot backup" mode or quiesce (I can never spell that word) that lets you flush the application out so it can be backed up in a known...
I snuck this screenshot out of the development labs for those people who have to see it to believe it.
Symantec is Deduplication Forward-looking Statements: Any forward-looking indication of plans (like this screenshot) for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be implemented and should not be considered firm commitments by Symantec and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
Most of you are probably aware that we released 6.5.4 NetBackup a few weeks ago. You can read all about it in the recent press release.
I thought I would share a few fun facts about the release. Over 200 people participated in our First Availability (FA) program. If you aren’t familiar with the FA program, unlike a Beta release, FA customers are actually encouraged to run the software in production and the release is fully supported. By the time we released 6.5.4 to the general public it had over 4000 days of production time behind it. When surveyed afterwards the participants gave the release a big thumbs up, with extremely high satisfaction rates and an astounding 91% responding that they would recommend 6.5.4 FA to other Symantec customers. If you participated I would like to offer you our sincere thanks for participation.
Given the number of enhancements in this release I...
I mentioned this on twitter earlier today but wanted to follow it up with some additional commentary. Sometime 140 characters aren’t enough.
The Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy organization, released a study that compares government web sites with commercial web sites. They used a variety of measures to create a score for each of the companies and government entities studied. The resultant table is below. Looking at our top 8 ranking, I have to say I feel proud to be in such good company.
I think this ranking speaks well to our many web teams. In a company of our scale the web teams span many disciplines from PR & marketing all the way...
I am loving the new Ideas feature of Connect. If you haven't seen it, be sure and check out Peter's video explaining how it works.
I serve as an election judge in my municipality, so I love the voting process - at least right up until you reach the point where the courts are mired down with the decision and you don't have a US senator months after the election. (Can anyone guess what state I live in?) The fact that our customers can actually vote an idea up or down is intriguing to me. I'm going to give it a week or so, then I'm going to float some of my own ideas to see if you like them.
Go ahead, submit an idea that would make NetBackup better for your enterprise.
David Chapa has been writing up some very helpful tips at tha "BaR and Grill" blog. I especially enjoyed the "Frequency Based Backup" article. I' ve got to send him some reporting screenshots one of these day, I'm pretty sure our latest throughput reports offer more functionality than the scripts he has been posting.
Really happy to see Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving http://bit.ly/qBCjS
If the size of the heap data segment is limited then for large process we may have a core dump because of the way the memory management is implemented in AIX.
Following are the quick solution to try out :-
1. ulimit -d unlimited ------ should allow larger process.
2. Increase the LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA setting at the AIX level prior to executing the command.
export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x20000000 ( Default on AIX is 0x10000000)
To make the setting permanent, place the LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x20000000 to the end of the/etc/environment file.
All must be set in the environment of the netbackup processes at startup.
3. NBU since 6.0.MP7 takes care of such issues. Because later the way the binaries were built was changed to take into consideration such scenarios. Making the changes in the /etc/environment will make the changes for the entire system.
Technical Explaination:-
On AIX, the 32-bit address space (= 232 or 4 GB) is divided into...
Do you seldom encounter slow mapping with flashbackup?
Look at your exclude file list. Do you really want to exclude 50% of the drive? When performing Flashbackup, setting up an exclude list will decrease the performance of the VxMS mapping. The exclude list processing requires a lot of resource and time, so excluding too much data will slow down performance.for an example if you are backing up a 1TB drive using FBU, mapping should take around 35-40 minutes in usual scenario but if you have a exclude list of say about half of TB, It may take a whooping 7-8 hours in just mapping.
Finding the fish in a large pond with millions of fish and mark it not to be fished. Not a great Idea and it need too much work to do. My advice on this, not to have a large exclude list while using FBU. your Back-ups may not work as fast as it use to.
I usually don't trumpet the arrival of each new Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) that we post for NetBackup, but this one is special since we're annoucning support for Quantum's OST device which I blogged about a little while back. Good stuff. I love treating disk as disk.
The Symantec Enterprise Vault and NetBackup Product Management Teams are conducting customer research in support of our product integration planning. The first part of this research effort is 4 page web survey (see below). This online survey is designed to collect some relevant customer environment and satisfaction/outlook data. We would like to get as many NetBackup and Enterprise Vault customers as possible to complete the survey so that we have a comprehensive data set, and also to leverage these responses in recruiting for our 2nd wave of research (customer “interviews”) and possibly other related follow-up discussions.
The survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete (it contains 40 questions). The survey is intended for product administrators (NBU and/or EV administrators). The questions assume a strong understanding of the information managed by our products, as well as the environment...
