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, “...
I snuck this screenshot out of the development labs for those people who have to see it to believe it.
Symantec is Deduplication Forward-looking Statements: Any forward-looking indication of plans (like this screenshot) for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be implemented and should not be considered firm commitments by Symantec and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
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 mentioned this on twitter earlier today but wanted to follow it up with some additional commentary. Sometime 140 characters aren’t enough.
The Brookings Institute, a nonprofit public policy organization, released a study that compares government web sites with commercial web sites. They used a variety of measures to create a score for each of the companies and government entities studied. The resultant table is below. Looking at our top 8 ranking, I have to say I feel proud to be in such good company.
I think this ranking speaks well to our many web teams. In a company of our scale the web teams span many disciplines from PR & marketing all the way...
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.
David Chapa has been writing up some very helpful tips at tha "BaR and Grill" blog. I especially enjoyed the "Frequency Based Backup" article. I' ve got to send him some reporting screenshots one of these day, I'm pretty sure our latest throughput reports offer more functionality than the scripts he has been posting.
Really happy to see Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving http://bit.ly/qBCjS
I usually don't trumpet the arrival of each new Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) that we post for NetBackup, but this one is special since we're annoucning support for Quantum's OST device which I blogged about a little while back. Good stuff. I love treating disk as disk.
My last post showed NetBackup Operations being displayed on a Nintendo Wii.
Stumpr asked about the iPhone. I'm glad you asked. Here is a screen shot of Veritas Backup Reporter on an iPhone.
I can't help you with the "how do I get my company to expense and iPhone or a new HDTV and a Wii" - although I wish I could.
The trend is clear - smart devices and ubiquitous remote access will mean that more and more administrators will want to peek into their environment and do administration from home or the local coffee shop. All I ask is that everyone will pull over their car when they need to initiate that critical restore request :)
I got a big chuckle out of this screen shot sent in by a customer. If you look closely on the bottom, the buttons are unmistakeably the Opera web browser on the Nintendo Wii. The web page displayed is the main monitoring page of NetBackup Operations Manager, which allows you to monitor, manage and report on NetBackup servers at multiple versions located potentially located in multiple locations. This is fantastic, you can play a few tennis matches, then switch gears and start monitoring backup and restore operations. We don't formally test compatibility with Opera on Wii but I would like to point out that it's better to have NetBackup on Wii than NetBackup ennui ;)
When I talk to customers about web interfaces, everyone brings up the simple use case of being in a remote situation where you...
This post pre-supposes that you have heard of twitter – if you haven’t, check out the wikipedia article. NetBackup has been on twitter for a while. Mostly we tweet NetBackup news or pointers to blog posts. When we see someone tweeting about NetBackup we’ll tweet back and see if there is anything we can do to help.
I am constantly looking for additional data on the markets, especially as it relates to markets served by NetBackup. I have access to the usual suite of products from industry analysts as well as our own internal intelligence and, of course, I monitor industry blogs, the press and a host of other data sources. One of the odder things I like to monitor is the book sales trends as published by O'Reilly. Today in their blog post, "State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market" they published their findings from the most recent quarter and year. Not surprisingly they reported that 2008 was the worst year for the dataset they are tracking – although the decline was not as steep as it was in 2001 (which precedes their tracked data set). Although sales are down in general, there are some categories reporting significant positive "rate of...
I recently had the chance to interview Steve Whitner from Quantum. This is the third in a series of interviews with our Open Storage partners. On January 27, 2009, Quantum announced the refresh for their DXi7500 Express and DXi7500 Enterprise both of which support the NetBackup Open Storage API. Steve Whitner works as a Product Marketing Manager for DXi and related disk products. Steve is an industry veteran working at ADIC then Quantum for over ten years.
Q) I'm interviewing you specifically about the OpenStorage program. You will be among the first few vendors set to release an OpenStorage solution. From your perspective what is the problem the OpenStorage program is trying to solve in the backup and recovery workflow?
A) Our customer requirements for backups have changed over the years. Today they need to write and restore data quickly while retaining the data for longer periods of time, but with minimal space, power & cooling...
Scott Waterhouse who writes at the “Backup Blog” posted a good note about an important and often ignored setting for NetBackup media servers. He references this in relation to EDL, the disk library which has an embedded NetBackup media server, although it is a useful tip for many other circumstances . He points out the need to make sure that you set up NetBackup correctly so that when you duplicate tapes or images it doesn’t require the data to traverse your IP network and slow your duplication down significantly. You do this by correctly setting the alternate read server for your duplication which you can do for a Disk Staging Storage Unit, in Vault or in a Storage Life Cycle policy.
In my last post, I discussed backup redesign, emphasizing the need to begin with an analysis of the basics which include understanding and analyzing RPO and RTO.
The acronyms RTO and RPO used to cause hands to be raised in presentations as they weren’t well understood by our industry. It seems like they have become standard terms in our industry, but let’s define them for completeness.
RPO — this stands for Recovery Point Objective. In the book, “Implementing Backup and Recovery” written by David Little and David Chapa it is defined as “How far back in time you are willing to go to recover.” If you backup once a day at midnight, and you delete a file at 11:59 PM the next day you will have a...
I noticed there has been some good NetBackup discussions going on at linkedin.com. Challenging times are a great reason to work on expanding your network.
of Veritas Backup Reporter on an iPhone. 