Kristine and I here at Symantec spoke with Jerome of DCIG blogging fame a few weeks ago. It was a good discussion and he turned around and decided to blog about it on his DCIG blog. The main points we agreed on during our conversations? CDP is in a very different place than it was a few years ago and it NEEDS to be integrated in to an existing backup product. Read the rest here and if you're really excited check out NetBackup RealTime.
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.
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.
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...
This week we launched a fun little site at NetBackupGuy.com. The first episode is up and shows our favorite little blue guy handling a monster of a large Exchange backup by using the fitness regimen of Granular Recovery Technology. There’s a few more videos to come so let us know what you think. The site lets you embed the videos so you can share them with other NBU friends. We’ve also put it up on Digg, delicious, Facebook and a few other social places if you wish to share.
As an easter egg if you check out the resumes for the characters on NetBackupGuy.com you can email them directly and we’re watching. We may even slip a few people a nice prize for entertaining us through emails sent to the characters. Hope you enjoy it and let us know your comments.
NetBackup 6.5.3.1 and NetBackup 6.0 MP7S are now posted on the Symantec support site <a href="http://www.symantec.com/business/support/overview.jsp?pid=15143">here</a> (click downloads on the right and select the version). NetBackup 6.5.3.1 is the first “triple-dot” hot-fix release produced by NetBackup, and it delivers a security vulnerability fix, a scheduler correction for backup windows that span midnight, and corrective fixes to the scheduler when spring and fall daylight savings time changes occur. NetBackup 6.0 MP7S delivers the same fixes on the 6.0 code line. Get it while it's hot!
When I first started working with NetBackup I got to work with a great team of NetBackup engineers on the Media Server team. These guys write a lot of the code that moves data through a NetBackup Media Server that interacts with tape and disk devices which is a pretty important role in the overall products since it is what touches the data and puts it where it belongs. They have been involved in reviewing, modifying and implementing the industry standards (the T10 SCSI specification) and honestly are some of the smartest guys I know. Except for when Keith spilled coffee inside our IBM TS3500 (still works!).
Sometimes they take heat since everyone is talking about disk and not tape these days. Well tape is not dead and here is a few reasons why:
Tape is well established, portable, encryptable and relatively low cost.
Tape is "green" when compared with disk since it...
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...
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.
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.
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
Larry, our expert technical product manager for all things Windows let me know this today: Due to popular demand we have released a technote (305549) that summarizes and clarifies the steps needed to configure the NetBackup 6.5.2/6.5.3 Sharepoint agent for granular recovery of Sharepoint 2003/2007 documents. Think of it as a “cheat sheet” that brings together information from several different manuals in one convenient location. You can find the technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/305549. On a related note, if you are using NetBackup 6.5.2 or 6.5.2a, you should also have a look at the 6.5.2 Late Breaking News technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/307880. This document lists a number of known problems with NetBackup 6.5.2 and includes links to other technotes that discuss each issue. All of the hotfixes associated with...
