“Best Practices for Storage Management and High Availability in your Microsoft Data Center” is now available online in the Things You Need to Know section of the Windows IT Pro website and is also in the September 2009 issue of Windows IT Pro.

Published by the Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows product team, 6 best practices for storage management and high availability are outlined for IT managers and system administrators to abide by. Enjoy!

Symantec recently announced the release of Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase ASE CE 5.0. Sybase ASE Cluster Edition (ASE CE) uses a shared-disk architecture designed to support up to 32 ASE server instances that simultaneously access a SAN.

Based on core Veritas technology, which has 15+ years of customer successes and hundreds of production customers in Sybase environments, Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase ASE CE combines the strengths of Sybase ASE CE with the robust storage management and high availability capabilities of Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server to implement robust, manageable, and scalable Sybase shared disk clusters. The integrated solution uses the same infrastructure software across an enterprise data center and enables shared cluster management with Sybase for database and application, offering benefits in the areas of Storage Management, High Availability and High Performance.

To learn more, view the joint...

A very useful - yet often overlooked - feature of Veritas Cluster Server is Limits and Prerequisites. This feature is often used in conjunction with Service Group Workload Management (SGWM), but can also be implemented on its own. In this post, I'll describe what this feature does and how you can put it to use.

Limits and Prerequisites are attributes in VCS. Limits are system attributes applied to the cluster member nodes, while Prerequisites are attributes applied to service groups. Both are key/value type attributes defined by the user. To better understand how these two attributes work together, it's best to use a common scenario as an example.

Let's say I have a VCS cluster consisting of four nodes and four Oracle database service groups. Let's assume that (1) each node is provisioned identically with the same processor and memory power and (2) each service group places about the same amount of load on each system. Implementing SGWM will automatically keep...

Hello from the Storage Foundation/High Availability Technical Product Management team, and welcome to the new Symantec Connect!  In this first VCS blog entry under the new format, we'll take a look at reducing the cost of HA by building larger, more "intelligent" clusters.

When most people think of clustering, they think of a 2-node, active/passive cluster in which a mission-critical application runs on one system (the active node) while a stand-by system (passive node) is ready to take over if something fails on the active node.  This approach works fine in an environment with one or maybe two mission-critical applications, but consider the costs of this approach in an environment with 10 or 15 or 20 mission-critical applications.

To avoid the costs of excessive hardware sparing, an "N+1" approach is often implemented in which "N" represents the number of active nodes and "+1" represents a single spare (idle) server....