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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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.
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....
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.
When we talk about performance issues a couple of things immediately come to mind. Probably first is making sure the expectations are realistic. Then we start the search for the bottleneck. There is always a bottleneck. Sometimes it will be a fast bottleneck but it is still there and you must know where it is before you can do anything else. Once you know where the bottleneck is you will know what your options are to increase performance and you will also have a very good idea what your expectations should really be.
There is not real rocket science involved in locating the bottleneck. It really just involves being systematic, keeping good notes, and having a good plan. There are several places where there is documentation to help with this process including the NetBackup 6.5 Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide (updated October 1, 2008) which is available on the Symantec support website...
I’ve lived in a couple major metropolitan areas. The kind with rush hour traffic so heavy a toddler on a tricycle can make better time. Sometimes the major arteries have an HOV lane – a golden pathway of asphalt for High Occupancy Vehicles. My route through Minneapolis has one. When I lived in New Jersey, I had to endure 25 miles of watching traffic zoom by us poor slobs in the neighboring lanes. There were times when the force of the air rushing by caused my car to sway. Popular rumor had it that some of the passenger silhouettes were really blowup dolls. It’s New York. Anything is possible and in fact highly probable.
So what do HOV lanes have in common with backup jobs? The new disk pool and disk storage unit design in NetBackup 6.5 allows you to treat some of your most precious client backup jobs as cars privileged to drive the fast...
Do you have Microsoft SQL Server in your environment? Then you should register for our webcast on NetBackup for SQL Server coming up in December. It will be hosted by Brian Smith and Larry Cadloff - two of our NetBackup experts. I will sadly be traveling overseas but if it's not at a crazy hour of the night I may listen in. You should definitely attend though. Definitely.
When? Wednesday December 10th at 11:00am pacific
What? Protecting Microsoft SQL Server with NetBackup
So you are barely meeting your backup window and now you have decided to replace your old LTO2 drives with faster LTO3 drives, or wait, LTO4 is available. Yeah, let’s go with those. After replacing your 8 old drives with 8 new ones you are ready to relax and watch things run. Why is the phone ringing at 2 AM? Why are backups not finishing within the backup window? Why are things worse? Too many people assume the tape drive is automatically the bottleneck in their backup environment without making sure that is the case. Too many people assume there are only two places to worry about performance, the tape drive and the media server bptm buffers. While these are two places to be concerned about they are not by any way, shape or form the only two places. In fact in today’s backup infrastructure they aren’t necessarily the first place to look. If you will bear with me I would like...
