Netting Out NetBackup
Joe Pfeiffer
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September 18th, 2009
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.
0 comments
Joe Pfeiffer
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July 29th, 2009
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.
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document.write(swfimport);document.write(dont_gamble_03_site_player);
Netting Out NetBackup, Storage Management, Backup and Archiving, MS Exchange, CommandCentral, Restore, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup, NetBackup RealTime Protection, Storage Foundation
1 comments
TimBurlowski
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July 22nd, 2009
There is a new technote entitled "Best Practices for using Storage Lifecycle Policies in NetBackup 6.5.3 and 6.5.4". This essential document, authored by engineering, support and product management, documents best practices, and is based on consolidated information obtained from real world experiences.
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, “NetBackup Disk Based Data Protection Options”. We’ve been refining and...
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Joe Pfeiffer
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July 18th, 2009
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.
About 6 months ago I...
0 comments
Pravs
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July 17th, 2009
from last one year, I have seen lots of folks (with in and outside organization) asking me about NODirectSDR registry entry or I have suggested them to use it to resolve lots of problems with flashbackup for windows policy type backups. I will get some time to post an article on that and usage info. I will update the link here as well.
Thanks,
Praveen
1 comments
Joe Pfeiffer
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July 9th, 2009
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 good...
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TimBurlowski
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July 9th, 2009
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.
0 comments
TimBurlowski
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July 8th, 2009
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 can’t do the justice to all the new functionality. You can get more info from the...
5 comments
TimBurlowski
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July 5th, 2009
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 to tech support. I would like to offer my personal congratulations to all of them.
When I personally consider the many public facing Symantec web properties that have created things that make a difference in my part of the company, the Information Management Group, there are a couple of web initiatives from the last year that...
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TimBurlowski
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May 28th, 2009
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.
1 comments
TimBurlowski
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May 22nd, 2009
Today's Links
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
1 comments
Vilobh Meshram
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May 8th, 2009
If the size of the heap data segment is limited then for large process we may have a core dump because of the way the memory management is implemented in AIX.
Following are the quick solution to try out :-
1. ulimit -d unlimited ------ should allow larger process.
2. Increase the LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA setting at the AIX level prior to executing the command.
export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x20000000 ( Default on AIX is 0x10000000)
To make the setting permanent, place the LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x20000000 to the end of the/etc/environment file.
All must be set in the environment of the netbackup processes at startup.
3. NBU since 6.0.MP7 takes care of such issues. Because later the way the binaries were built was changed to take into consideration such scenarios. Making the changes in the /etc/environment will make the changes for the entire system.
Technical Explaination:-
On AIX, the 32-bit address space (= 232 or 4 GB) is divided into 16 segments, each 256 MB (256 MB*16 = 4 GB). When a 32-bit...
0 comments
Pravs
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April 17th, 2009
Do you seldom encounter slow mapping with flashbackup?
Look at your exclude file list. Do you really want to exclude 50% of the drive? When performing Flashbackup, setting up an exclude list will decrease the performance of the VxMS mapping. The exclude list processing requires a lot of resource and time, so excluding too much data will slow down performance.for an example if you are backing up a 1TB drive using FBU, mapping should take around 35-40 minutes in usual scenario but if you have a exclude list of say about half of TB, It may take a whooping 7-8 hours in just mapping.
Finding the fish in a large pond with millions of fish and mark it not to be fished. Not a great Idea and it need too much work to do. My advice on this, not to have a large exclude list while using FBU. your Back-ups may not work as fast as it use to.
Praveen Gupta
19 comments
TimBurlowski
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March 26th, 2009
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.
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Rick Krieger
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March 19th, 2009
The Symantec Enterprise Vault and NetBackup Product Management Teams are conducting customer research in support of our product integration planning. The first part of this research effort is 4 page web survey (see below). This online survey is designed to collect some relevant customer environment and satisfaction/outlook data. We would like to get as many NetBackup and Enterprise Vault customers as possible to complete the survey so that we have a comprehensive data set, and also to leverage these responses in recruiting for our 2nd wave of research (customer “interviews”) and possibly other related follow-up discussions.
The survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete (it contains 40 questions). The survey is intended for product administrators (NBU and/or EV administrators). The questions assume a strong understanding of the information managed by our products, as well as the environment configuration. ...
Enterprise Vault, Netting Out NetBackup, Backup and Archiving, Features, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup
0 comments
Jon Eyre
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March 19th, 2009
Growth is a problem lots of companies would like to be dealing with right now. But it isn’t always easy to manage growth, especially growing your IT infrastructure to keep up with a fast-growing business.
This was a problem facing ENGlobal, an engineering firm that provides services to the energy sector. ENGlobal has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, both organically and through acquisitions. As a result of this growth, the company ENGlobal had outsourced its backup operations to couldn’t keep up, causing backup costs to increase by 50 percent.
ENGlobal made the determination that could cut costs and be better off financially in the long run if they were to bring data protection back in house. The company turned to NetBackup to solve its backup needs. Over the life of the project, ENGlobal expects to save $6.25 million in outsourcing costs and save between 50 and 70 percent on data recovery.
Click here to learn more about ENGlobal’s...
Enterprise Vault, Netting Out NetBackup, Customer Reference, Backup and Archiving, Backup Reporter, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup, NetBackup PureDisk
0 comments
TimBurlowski
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March 19th, 2009
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 :)
0 comments
TimBurlowski
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March 18th, 2009
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 need to take action or check on status without installing a bulky console application. NetBackup Operations Manager is tailored made for that situation.
7 comments
Jon Eyre
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March 6th, 2009
Growth is a problem lots of companies would like to be dealing with right now. But it isn’t always easy to manage growth, especially growing your IT infrastructure to keep up with a fast-growing business.
This was a problem facing ENGlobal, an engineering firm that provides services to the energy sector. ENGlobal has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, both organically and through acquisitions. As a result of this growth, the company ENGlobal had outsourced its backup operations to couldn’t keep up, causing backup costs to increase by 50 percent.
ENGlobal made the determination that could cut costs and be better off financially in the long run if they were to bring data protection back in house. The company turned to NetBackup to solve its backup needs. Over the life of the project, ENGlobal expects to save $6.25 million in outsourcing costs and save between 50 and 70 percent on data recovery.
Click here to learn more about...
0 comments
stefaanv
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March 2nd, 2009
How deduplication can contribute to the restore process….
A couple of days back, whilegiving a PureDisk lecture, I got into an interesting discussion about howdeduplication technologies pop up at different levels: deduplication at the source, at the target,at a gateway level, or built into the application. You name it; they are allavailable and focused on incredible numbers pushed by dedup enthusiasts.
In the case of the backupsolutions, the focus seems primarily on dedup savings during the backupprocess, where higher deduplication rates can deliver higher backupthroughputs, reduce backup time, and support much longer retention on disk. Allare correct and very efficient, don't get me wrong, as I'm one of thoseenthusiasts, but what about the restore process? That is where thediscussion touched an interesting subject...
Can deduplication be used toimprove the restore speed? The answer is Yes!
Take, for example, the remoteoffice scenario where local tape solutions are replaced...
1 comments
Joe Pfeiffer
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February 27th, 2009
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.
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Netting Out NetBackup, Basics, Backup and Archiving, NetBackup, NetBackup PureDisk, NetBackup RealTime Protection
11 comments
TimBurlowski
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February 19th, 2009
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 have been very inspired to read about Comcast and how they use twitter as an adjunct to their normal email and phone customer service. Twitter, in addition to it's usefulness as a micro-blog platform, can be a great way to find out about problems early and prevent customers from becoming dissatisfied. (In the interest of full disclosure at home I’m a Comcast customer who has personally contacted @comcastcares and had a great experience.)
So last week, I got my own chance, when I got a distressing tweet from a NetBackup admin, Seth Bokelman from the University of Northern Iowa, who was reporting a problem with backup speed. When...
2 comments
TimBurlowski
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February 18th, 2009
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 change" is unit sales. The one category that is no surprise to me is the stand-out performance of the...
0 comments
stefaanv
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February 18th, 2009
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;}NetBackup PureDisk 6.5.1 is now ready for download. Check out the new performance improvements for backup and replication jobs as the support for Windows...
3 comments
Joe Pfeiffer
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February 17th, 2009
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!
15 comments