Category: Symantec

Does anyone find it somewhat ironic that backup software providers are spending more time and effort to make sure that the backup and recovery of both physical and virtual machines (VMs) take no time? This is being driven by enterprises who increasingly expect application backups and recoveries to occur without waiting. So to better meet these rising expectations, Symantec NetBackup™ 7.1 got cozier with Symantec’s NetBackup RealTime software to provide the near real time backup and recovery functionality that enterprises increasingly want.

Every backup software provider emphasizes support for virtual machine backup so it is no surprise that enhanced support for VMware backup and recovery is a major focus in today’s Symantec NetBackup 7.1 release. But as anyone acquainted with virtual machine backup knows, the differences between just “supporting” virtual machine backup and supporting it well can be substantial. It is in this area Symantec NetBackup 7.1 differentiates itself.

Once upon a time, data center management was a task reserved for really large enterprises that had thousands of square feet of data center floor space and teams dedicated to supporting it. But now almost any size organization can have a significant number of physical and virtual machines (VMs) deployed in a relatively small data center with only a few people to manage it. This situation dictates that these organizations put in place data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software so they can achieve the levels of efficiency and reliability that they expect without compromising either availability or support.

Symantec’s decision to offer hardware as well as software is generating a lot of buzz among both customers and storage providers alike. But what is getting overlooked is that in order for Symantec to succeed and gain mind share in today’s Windows environments, it needs to do more than just offer a hardware/software bundle; Symantec needs to become more Windows friendly in general. That is exactly what Symantec accomplishes by not just adding hardware to its portfolio but adding support for clustered CIFS and tightening its integration with Enterprise Vault in its FileStore v5.6 release.

One of the first thoughts that almost always comes to mind when users think of Symantec’s Storage Foundation software is that it is hardware agnostic. That neutrality is not going away but new customer demands for turnkey solutions from a single provider are changing how all vendors have to operate. Symantec is not immune to these new trends and last week we saw a new era beginning with Symantec announcing its new FileStore N8300 appliance that is available for purchase from Symantec as a bundled hardware solution.

Dynamically moving files from one tier of storage to another has been a feature on the Veritas File System (VxFS) for some time. But to date Oracle DBAs have lacked this same level of data mobility and granular control when managing Oracle database tables. This is no longer the case.

Moving unstructured data onto lower cost tiers of storage is an initiative on almost every enterprise organization’s “to-do” list. But convincing a business unit or department to “volunteer” to move its data to a lower cost tier is not always as easy as it seems, especially when doing so may possibly put production applications at risk.

Configuring high availability for virtual machines (VMs) in VMware environments presents new challenges that are not always easy to spot when applications are virtualized. One prime example is handling the failover of applications on VMs that are part of a cluster without causing a network split brain. It is this exact issue that Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Storage Foundation HA 5.1 addresses with its new non-SCSI-3 fencing feature.

Arbitrating a network split in stretch cluster configurations, such as campus clusters, is a continuing challenge in managing fail over configurations. One specific challenge is optimizing the management of a recovery of a cluster when a network split occurs. It is this flexibility to favor a specific site that is part of a campus cluster such that it emerges the winner is what the new preferred fencing feature in Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation HA 5.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) provides.

Downtime is rarely an option for mission critical applications and while many strides have been made over the last decade to ensure uninterrupted application availability, some gaps in providing protection still remain. One of these is reducing the time it takes to detect when a failure has occurred so a recovery on a secondary server can be promptly initiated and successfully completed. It is expediting these server recoveries that the new Intelligent Monitoring Framework introduced in Storage Foundation HA 5.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) accomplishes.