Symantec backup appliances provide many business value benefits.  In my previous blog, Realizing OpEx Savings with Symantec Backup Appliances,  five (5) areas of  OpEx savings were identified: 

• Acquisition
• Installation and integration
• System administration
• Upgrades: software and hardware
• Support/maintenance

And the topic of Acquisition were examined.  The next two areas to examine are Installation/Integration and Administration. 

Installation/Integration

The area with the greatest savings is Installation and Integration.  Depending on your environment, the amount of time it takes to perform the tasks, and if professional services are used, the savings may run into the tens of thousands of dollars. 

An important point to note is the...

Now that we know how VM discovery job works for a VMware Intelligent Policy (VIP), let us move on to the actual backup job. The process flow described here is the same for both VIP and browse-and-select type policies unless specified otherwise.

As we did in the previous blog, let us assume that the NetBackup master server, media server and VMware backup host are three different systems.

1. NetBackup Policy Execution Manager (nbpem) triggers a backup job once the policy, schedule, virtual machine combination is due and backup window is open. It works in conjunction with NetBackup Job Manager (nbjm), NetBackup Resource Broker (nbrb) and NetBackup Enterprise Media Manager (nbemm) to identify the resources (media server, storage unit etc.) for backup. This resource identification process is well detailed in NetBackup Documentation,...

With the one-two punch of an earthquake in the Mid-Atlantic US followed closely by a hurricane potentially hitting the same region, Disaster Recovery is probably a popular discussion right now in the Washington DC area.  Of course Business Continuity professionals write contingency plans for all types of disasters, not just ones caused by nature.  Don’t you want to ask God, or Mother Nature, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster what else we should be planning for, and in what order or combination?  Do you think DC Business Continuity professionals have planned for things like enemy countries parachuting in armies of robotic killer crabs with pompadours and lasers?  What about zombies?  And is there a real difference between planning for zombies or natural disasters?  Well, that’s what I’d like to explore today; the nuances of disaster planning for the zombie apocalypse as it pertains to data protection.

I’d like you to treat...

Yes, I’m talking about the Disney film – “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs”…and there’s  Sneezy, Doc, Happy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful and the perennial slacker --Sleepy.  At best, companies see Disaster Recovery (DR) as a necessary evil.  At worst, it’s an unnecessary drain on already strained IT budgets and resources. DR is all about storing redundant data and applications on a lot of expensive hardware sitting somewhere remotely, in standby mode just “sleeping the IT day away”.  And if you don’t have hardware sitting idle, then you’re likely shipping backup tapes to some offsite storage or co-location bunker site.

Distance is like hitting the Disaster Recovery “Snooze Button”

A big limitation to these type of DR scenarios is distance. Recovery times can be severely impacted depending on how long it takes to get backup tapes from storage back to your...