But why would you do such a thing?? You'd have to be really frickin' stupid to burn dollar bills to light a fire!!

Yeah, I knew you'd agree with that. Fortunately, NetBackup customers are smarter than the average bear (or, let's say, the average backup administrator). NetBackup customers know that backing up ESX servers twice (once for the VM image, once for all the individual files) is like burning dollar bills, and additionally, backing up without using incrementals is like throwing a few twenties on top.

Let's explore the incrementals angle a bit. NetBackup 6.5.2 is the only backup product available that supports incremental backups with VCB. How does this work? Using VCB at the VMDK level, a full image is backed up initially, and then catalogued on the proxy server. Subsequently, incremental backups are performed by comparing the contents of a VM against the stored catalog of the initial full image. If changes are detected, then VCB is...

During his presentation at the Customer Forum last week Curtis Preston commented that the choice of backup storage technology should not compromise the restore time.  His comment was specifically aimed at deduplicating technologies and was a timely reminder that you should always test the time to restore when evaluating deduplicating storage.  (He also made the valid point that not all deduplication is the same and you shoud always evaluate at least two dedupe devices and compare the space savings.)

His comments reminded me that the whole reason we do backups is to be able to restore and that we should never lose sight of that all important RTO target.  Technologies such as client side dedupulication and synthetic full backup are very good ways of achieving a backup when bandwidth is limited but you need to remember that recovering a server or application over a narrow pipe is going to take a long time.

When it comes to...

I love good news first thing in the morning.

IDC's quarterly Storage SoftwareTracker reportcame out and the news was great, at least for us. "Symantec's 26.9 percent overall storagesoftware marketshare growth nearly doubled that of the overall storagesoftware marketgrowth due to strong demand of its innovative solutions,includingNetBackup, Backup Exec and Storage Foundation." - Symantec Demonstrates Market Leadership in Storage Software

Good work team.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}
So what am I hoping to get out of the event?

I am hoping to see if people like the neat UI stuff we are doing. Since the improvements we are making...