Category: Symantec

Ask almost any system administrator what he or she spends the majority of their working day doing and the response almost always includes managing changes and updates to their systems. It is for this reason that over three (3) years ago Symantec introduced its complimentary web-based Symantec Operations Readiness Tool (formerly known as Veritas Operations Services). Now with this month’s latest release, Symantec extends the benefits that the Operations Readiness Tool provides to Storage Foundation, NetBackup and Storage Foundation for Windows users.

One of the trends in the upcoming decade in storage management is already taking shape: Automation. This trend is driven in large part by the new storage management features that have been introduced in the previous decade to address specific application challenges, but that have – in the process – created their own set of challenges in managing these features. It is these challenges that today’s release of Veritas Operations Manager 3.1 is designed to address.

A little over two years ago companies were advised to “start small” with virtualization but “think big” and, based upon what we are seeing today, it’s clear that organizations followed that advice considering the wide scale adoption of virtualization that has occurred. But as they enter the “Think big” phase many are encountering a roadblock: business critical applications that they are hesitant to virtualize because of availability concerns on virtualized platforms. Enter this week’s newly announced ApplicationHA from Symantec that looks to extend server virtualization all the way to even these business critical apps.

Symantec’s decision to decouple DMP from its parent Storage Foundation puts concerns about other dependencies that all multi-pathing software solutions have to rest. Currently, a standalone version of DMP is available for Solaris, AIX and Red Hat and SuSe Linux. Beginning in Q4 2010, Symantec will also make DMP available as a standalone product for HP-UX and Windows. This now frees customers to deploy DMP without a requirement to first deploy Storage Foundation or VxFS.

Backup problems are supposed to be gone, right? All you have to do is throw in some disk and a good dose of deduplication and organizational backup problems will magically disappear. So while that may be true up to a point, today’s newly released Information Management Health Check survey conducted by Applied Research and sponsored by Symantec reveals that organizations are failing to take into account the implications of what infinite backup retention periods mean for them long term.

In the past two months I have probably received more calls from end-users inquiring as to what steps they should take to re-architect their backup infrastructures than I have in the past two years. Yet what I find encouraging is that they are no longer just asking me for point solutions or short term fixes. Rather they are looking for architectures that they can put in place that will solve their immediate pain points while leaving them well-positioned for the future.

A few months ago I wrote a blog entry that took a look at how enhancements in the NFS v4 standard have opened the door for NAS file service appliances to be used with more highly available (HA) transaction-oriented applications such as the TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). But before organizations adopt a NAS solution that uses NFS v4 for real-time failover, they should be aware of features offered by the Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) solution that NAS with NFS v4 alone does not yet provide.

In a previous blog entry, I took a look at how Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) combined with Veritas Cluster File System (CFS) – Veritas CFS High Availability – enables organizations to achieve faster failover without the associated complexity and costs. Despite these advantages, organizations that are already using an HA solution such as Oracle RAC still may be reticent to switch as they need more concrete business and technical reasons to justify such a switch to Veritas CFS. But here’s the good news: There is an unequivocal answer to the “To RAC or Not to RAC” question.

The tolerance for downtime in enterprises is nearly gone. Business requirements have changed, service levels are more stringent and every second of an outage could translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue. Classic high-availability (HA) solutions no longer cut it as enterprise applications require fast failovers, often with sub-minute recovery times.

Two general techniques have now emerged that reclaim storage on thinly provisioned volumes: zero page reclamation and file system-based, intelligent storage reclamation. Both techniques identify when blocks are freed on a thinly provisioned volume and mark them as available for reclamation and restoration to the storage array’s general storage pool. However there are other factors that come into play that should influence when organizations select intelligent versus zero page reclamation as their preferred method of storage reclamation.