Netting Out NetBackup

 Thought these were fun.  Yes they are propaganda but it's a good way to describe to a non-IT person what Symantec (or you) do with infrastructure software.

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 I really like comparing personal backup to enterprise backup. When I first started working in the world of storage my head was swimming with tape drives, storage arrays and the ridiculous number of acronyms our industry loves to use. I didn't even back things up at home. So to dive in to my new job I went out and built a RedHat machine and installed the NetBackup 5.1 beta so I could start protecting my other 2 machines. Probably over kill but it let me play around and learn the product. Eventually I eased up and started using Norton 360 with a portable hard drive. This was way more simple to use and I've actually had it save me a couple of times recently when I was trying out the Windows 7 beta's and deleted the wrong partition (ops, no more 500GB media drive). I slept a little better at night knowing that I had a second copy of my data. And growing up in the digital age, I don't have a single picture, video or music file that is not on a machine.

About 6...

 Yesterday I was talking with a Symantec user about the decisions you have to make when picking how to recover from a failure.  Like most companies they had a whole slew of options from clustering and high-availability, to replication, snapshots and tape.  Most people we talk with have some idea of the amount of time they can tolerate to get back up from a failure and the amount of data they are willing to lose but these two things (time and data lost) are more related than most people think and this user especially understood that...particularly when it comes to applications.  It really is one of the biggest problems applications have when you try to back them up.   They have to be stopped or paused since some data may be in memory or logs that haven't been fully written to disk.  So most backup apps have a "hot backup" mode or quiesce (I can never spell that word) that lets you flush the application out so it can be backed up in a known...

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...