Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Curtis Preston aka Mr. Backup. Curtis works at GlassHouse Technologies and is a well known consultant, author, speaker and expert on the topic of enterprise backup and recovery. His books include “Backup and Recovery” and “Using SANs and NAS”. Curtis consults with some of our largest NetBackup customers and has been a great partner over the years.

Tim) Tell us a little about yourself. When did you first start working with NetBackup and what are you up to now?

Curtis) I started doing backups 15 years ago at a large credit card company.

First I was the backup guy. Then I was in charge of the backup guys.The next thing I knew, I was a backup consultant and I was stuck in it forever!

There are 19 days until Symantec Vision 2008 in Las Vegas.

I'll be there and am hoping to meet lots of you. If you are hyper-connected like Joe and I you'll be able to check out the conference in some of your favorite social networking sites.

Vision on Flickr Vision on LinkedIn Vision on YouTube Vision of Facebook

Joe and I will probably do some live blogging from the events.

Can't wait to see you there!

Message Edited by TimBur on 06-05-2008 11:35 AM

I came across this article on SearchStorage.com talking about creating service level agreements in data protection:

Greenberg laid out a two-step process to setting up the SLA. The first step involves aligning data protection with the business, and requires administrators to determine issues, such as the cost of data protection, who the data owners are, what the data is and where it lives, what the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are, encryption requirements and retention periods of data.

The second step involves data protection methods. Greenberg said data protection requirements must be driven by legal and business needs. "Shape the technology around business processes, not the other way around," he said.

Working from business requirements towards the technology that supports it is one of the best ways you can architect a data protection environment.  Sometimes it's hard when you're caught up...

Here is the second thing I love about NetBackup for VMWare. It's a a little more complicated than part one so hang in there.

This quote comes from an internal forum at Symantec where people can ask questions about our technologies. I saw it and immediately knew I wanted to share it.

If you don't know who George is he wrote the whitepaper on NetBackup VMWare Best Practices.

Here is what he said.

"Competitors can all backup at the VMDK level. We do this as well.

Where we have a significant advantage is at restore time. Anybody can restore a single file from a VMDK backup. The question is what is the exact process for restore?

Because we are able to find (map) and index individual files at backup time, we can restore files directly from a VMDK file WITHOUT having to first restore the...