Point in time copy is a technology that permit to make the copies of a large sets of data a common activity.

Like photographic snapshots capture images of physical action, point in time copy or snapshot are virtual or physical copies of data that capture the state of data set contents at a single instant. Both virtual (copy-on-write) and physical (full-copy) snapshots protect against corruption of data’s content. Additionally, full-copy snapshots can protect against physical destruction. These copies can be used for a backup, a checkpoint to restore the state of an application , data mining, test data and kind of off-host processing. An important peculiarity of these copies is that from the application point of view the copy seems to occur atomically. That means that all the data updates that happens on the original data are applied before or after the point in time copy.

The definition that the Storage...

Information Technology (IT) is tightly integrated with the business; it has transformed the way we do business.  Nicholas G. Carr points out his seminal Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter that the capital investment in IT is significant; “nearly 50% of capital expenditures by American companies and more than $2 trillion a year globally are spent on IT. …no one would dispute that information technology has become the backbone of commerce.  It underpins the operations of individual companies, ties together far-flung supply chains, and, increasingly, links businesses to the customers they serve.  Hardly a dollar or euro changes hands anymore without the aid of computer systems”.   Technology is the fundamental infrastructure for the modern business.

Carr continues with; “Today, an IT disruption can paralyze a company’s ability to make products, deliver its services...

On February 20, 2013, Symantec completed another release of Symantec Operations Readiness Tool (SORT)! With SORT’s focus of improving the total customer experience for Storage Foundation and NetBackup customers, we’ve added the following Storage Foundation High Availability Solutions features and improvements to the website:

• Support of the Storage Foundation 6.0.2 release

Visit SORT at http://sort.symantec.com to see why thousands of Symantec customers continue to gain value from the site.

Recently one of my customers had a series of outages in the Communications between their buildings. The upshot of this is because of the way they had deployed their clusters they weren’t protected against their cluster nodes losing communications between each other. I have seen mixed experiences from my customers in terms of split brain issues (split brain is when all nodes in a cluster begin writing in an uncoordinated fashion to shared storage as they each believe they are the last node in the cluster)

I have seen customers running Campus Clusters with no split brain protection and have yet to see any problems. I have also seen other customers who go belt and braces using IO fencing which is built into VERITAS cluster server. Some have issues due to the way they handle the IO fencing devices as they are often not understood. So what's it all about then? it’s pretty simple.

For a cluster to work there needs to be a communication system between the...