Netting Out NetBackup

I can't decide if this is an Easter Egg or simple serendipity. Thanks for one of my peeps on twitter who follows @NetBackup.

I promise to go back to providing useful information in my next post.

There is a new technote entitled "Best Practices for using Storage Lifecycle Policies in NetBackup 6.5.3 and 6.5.4". This essential document, authored by engineering, support and product management, documents best practices, and is based on consolidated information obtained from real world experiences.

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, “...

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 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.