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Netting Out NetBackup

Can You REALLY customize your backup reporting product?
Joe Pfeiffer | 29 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Pretty much every backup reporting product claims their product is customizable (including us).   Let’s take a closer look at this. With each backup product, there is a set of reports that comes with it. These are often referred to as “canned reports” or “out-of-the-box-reports” where, once you’ve installed, you can start generating these reports.  These reports typically are bound to a pre-defined timeframe (i.e. last 24 hours, last week etc..) and represent a pre-defined target (all backup domains, a tape library, a backup server etc…).
 
So, when someone asks “can I customize reports”, what do they mean?  What are they expecting?  The classic definition of customization says it’s  “modification to meet individual needs”.  Well, individual needs will most likely eclipse the canned report set – by a lot.  That is, generating reports above and beyond...

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Holiday Gift Giving
TimBurlowski | 18 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

It's the holidays and I'm feeling a little more silly than usual.

Enjoy!

 

 

Message Edited by TimBur on 12-18-2008 06:45 PM
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Another Backup Myth: Consecutive Failures
Joe Pfeiffer | 17 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

My post on backup reporting myths sparked some interest from a colleague (Hal Uygur) so here is his favorite myth - consecutive failures.  A common question from backup administrators is “can you tell me servers that failed x consecutive times?”.  Across the backup reporting vendors, many claim that they  can produce such a report.  Can they?  Well, it depends on what is meant by “consecutive”.  Sarcasm aside, but this topic requires looking under the covers so that the advertised functionality meets the requirement.  Consecutive failures can basically be broken down to “consecutive job” failures  and “consecutive window failures”.

Lets start with the easier one - “consecutive job failures”.  This is simply a straight line calculation of looking at jobs for a specific timeframe and determining when x many of them occurred consecutively.  For example, if we look at...

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How many Cartridges will I need to backup my data ?
Vilobh Meshram | 17 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Based on a recent study and suggestions I plan to come up with the post describing approximately how many tapes will we need to backup the data.

Ideal Data Transfer Rate = Amount of data to backup / Backup Window

Suppose you have 100 GB of data to backup and an 8 hour window then ideal data transfer rate would be 12.5 GB/hr . You would choose the Drive based on that requirement. After selecting the appropriate drive technology that provides the performance and selecting the cartridge capacity you need, we will focus on the how many cartridges you will need to have available.The number of cartridges depends upon the amount of data that you are backing up, the frequency of your backup, your retention period and the capacity of media used to store your backups.

A simple formula that can be used is

Number of Tapes= (total data to backup * Frequency of backup * Retention Period)/Tape Capacity

Following is an example:-

Total amount of data to...

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SAN Client fact and fiction
Lykewake | 16 Dec 2008 | 1 comment

The SAN client was introduced in NetBackup 6.5 to allow large amounts of data to backed up rapidly over SAN connections rather than using LANs. The SAN client has distinct advantages over both the LAN client and the SAN media server . The SAN client is much easier to administer and operate the a SAN media server as no devices are presented directly to the server being backed up. It also offers significantly faster transfer rates that Gbit LAN connections allow (testing with 4 Gbit HBAs has shown transfer speeds of the order of 500 Mbytes/sec). In the initial 6.5 GA release the SAN client was limited to 2 Gbit fibre connections and could only back up to disk on the media server.

 

Both of these restrictions were removed in NetBackup 6.5.2 when backup direct to tape and support for 4Gbit HBAs was introduced. The platform coverage for FT Media Servers to support the SAN client was also extended. The SAN client can be used with most standard NetBackup clients and...

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Backup Reporting Myths
Joe Pfeiffer | 12 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Back in June at Symantec Vision we had a group that busts myths perform (we're not allowed to use their official name but you can guess who these "busters" were).  We love to throw claims (myths) around in the storage industry so I thought I'd debunk a few things I've been reading about lately.  Yes, I am writing from a storage vendor as well so take it with a grain of salt but this is an attempt to at least bring these claims to light and let you make your own decisions.

Real time Reporting
There are several third party products that claim to do this.  These products typically compare the most with our own Veritas Backup Reporter (VBR for short) but really this is a feature we compare with NetBackup Operations Manager (NOM for short).  Both the 3rd party products as well as VBR simply can not do true real time reporting.  The way backup data is collected from all these applications is by executing a NetBackup...

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Become a fan of NetBackup
TimBurlowski | 12 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

You can now find us on Facebook. That means you can become a fan, discuss current topics and hear the latest news.

Message Edited by TimBur on 12-12-2008 02:16 PM
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NetBackup 6.5.3 at TSYS
Joe Pfeiffer | 09 Dec 2008 | 1 comment

Dhammica has a pretty strictly firewalled environment with Wintel based NetBackup servers (Windows 2003) backing up nearly a 1000 wintel, AIX & Linux clients with 20-40TB of storage.  They also have a large number of VMWare machines being protected with NetBackup. For databases they back up Lotus Notes 7, Oracle 9i RAC, Oracle 10g and MS SQL.  And finally for encryption they like to use the IBM EKM built in to the IBM TS3500 (3584) library along with IBM TS1120 tape drives.  Want to be as cool as Dhammica?  Get NetBackup 6.5.3 for yourself here.

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Where's NetBackup 6.5.3?
CRZ | 03 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

To find the NetBackup 6.5.3 release updates, you can either go directly to the big list using this link:

 http://www.symantec.com/business/support/downloads.jsp?pid=15143&version=NBUESVRPVER33012

 

...or you can go to our "list of links" TechNote for 6.5.3, which contain direct links to every update on a single page:

 http://support.veritas.com/docs/315028

 

These 6.5.3 updates can - and should! - be applied to ANY 6.5.x environment.  That means 6.5.3 can be installed on top of 6.5 (aka 6.5 GA), 6.5.1, 6.5.1A, 6.5.2, or 6.5.2A!  Because it is a CUMULATIVE update, you will get all the fixes in the 6....

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NetBackup 6.5.3 is Out!
Joe Pfeiffer | 02 Dec 2008 | 0 comments

Today engineering and support posted NetBackup 6.5.3 so anyone can go grab it right now from entsupport.symantec.com.  Head on over and get your patent-pending Exchange Granular Recovery Technology on.  EGRT (as we love our acronyms) happened to be the only new feature added to 6.5.3 so the bulk of the effort was spent on making this thing bullet proof.  The final version has already been running in production environments for 650 days across several of our largest NetBackup users so upgrade with confidence and let us know what you think.

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