Storage and Availability Management Blog

The Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec is dedicated to providing solutions that enable efficient storage management and highly available infrastructure. Find news, information and tips that help you to resolve your storage management, high availability and disaster recovery issues across the heterogeneous data center.

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  Updated: SAMG Tech Support Team 11 Jul 2011

  Best Practices for Veritas Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions 5.1 Installation and Upgrade

  Here's some installation and upgrade information from our Tech Support team. Symantec strongly recommends the following best practices: 1. Read the 5.1 Late Breaking News Technotes: Solaris http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/334829 Linux   http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/335001 AIX     http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/334998 2. Use the Symantec Operation Readiness Tool for 5.1 installation and upgrade preparation: https://sort.symantec.com 3. View the 5.1 instructional videos ...
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  Updated: mobilegleed 22 Mar 2012

  Answers to Common VCS One Questions

  A few weeks back a large number of Product Managers, Technical Product Managers, and Sales Engineers (SEs) gathered for our annual SE Symposium in Las Vegas.  VCS One was definitely on everyone's mind, especially with the upcoming 5.0 release.  Here's a summary of the Q & A from the VCS One sessions I attended. Question:   How many Policy Masters (PMs) are needed for a VCS One Cluster? Answer:      One PM per cluster.  Larger environments will implement multiple VCS One Clusters per data center. Question:  Does the PM have to run in an active/passive cluster? Answer:     Do to the critical role of the PM dedicating hardware is best to ensure performance, reliability, and availability.    Question:  Can we run other apps on the PM cluster? Answer:  ...
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  Updated: Rishi Manocha 05 Mar 2010

  New Release: Storage Foundation Manager 2.1

  Storage Foundation Manager 2.1 is now available, and here's your one-stop spot for short how-to screencasts to get up and running fast, download info, and links to technical documentation and discussion forums. What's New? Storage Foundation Manager 2.1 is a cross platform release, and includes updates to the Central Server on Linux, Solaris and Windows, as well as updates to Managed Hosts on all platforms. The 2.1 release includes the following new features: Health Check now supports Windows hosts (in addition to Unix hosts) License Deployment Reporter (LDR) now supports Windows hosts (in addition to Unix hosts) Support for MS SQL and Exchange for Windows Better Oracle discovery Native Managed host for IA64 on Windows Performance improvements and bug fixes Enhanced Converged Agent support (partnering with CommandCentral) Seamless upgrade support for SFM 2.0...
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  Updated: phil samg 05 Mar 2010

  Capacity management the key to storage cost savings

  Storage capacity management obviously drives CapEx expenditures. However, capacity management also ripples through the rest of storage infrastructure cost profile. Capacity impacts software license costs, maintenance costs as well as power/cooling and floor space costs. Thus, capacity management is the #1 thing that any IT organization can do for cost containment. Here is a related post with four steps that you can take to control capacity: storagenerve.com/2009/08/24/taming-the-storage-budget-beast/ .
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  Updated: Eric.Hennessey 05 Mar 2010

  Understanding Veritas Cluster Server Limits and Prerequisites

  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...
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  Updated: phil samg 05 Mar 2010

  Storage Management: Turning Things Around (Part 2 of 4)

  To make better use of storage resources, organizations can leverage storage management technologies. Storage resource management (SRM), for example, enables IT to navigate the storage environment and identify old or non-critical data that can be moved to less expensive storage. These tools can also be used to predict future capacity requirements. Managing storage without an SRM tool is like going on a journey without a map. Having a clear plan and objective before taking action is the best assurance of rapid progress and success. Storage managers should ask some questions before cost-cutting: What is the average utilization rate? What is the utilization rate by application? Which applications are growing fastest? Slowest? SRM technology can help companies make an assessment and provide an enterprise-wide view of the storage environment, which helps identify problem areas, consolidation opportunities, and to create a priority...
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  Updated: Rishi Manocha 05 Mar 2010

  New Functionality Available: Veritas Installation Assessment Service and VOS Labs

  The following services have just been updated. Please find below new functionalities now available to you: Veritas Installation Assessment Service [VIAS] Combined Notification Center – Users can create user defined ad-hoc or environment specific notifications for new patches, ASL/APM releases, new versions of the HCL and updates to Veritas Operations Services (VOS) from one easy-to-use web application. Both the notification center and VIAS reports now connect directly with Patch Central allowing the applications to synergistically cross-leverage customer data Windows Support (Beta) – Support for the SFWHA “ConfigChecker” application to pre-qualify Windows environments Find Out More Link to VIAS ...
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  Updated: Eric.Hennessey 05 Mar 2010

  Reducing the cost of high availability with larger clusters

  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....