Information Technology Navigator

The Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas was buzzing all week with activities surrounding VMworld 2017. Here are my takeaways on VMware’s many announcements:

VMware on Amazon Web Services: The big announcement was VMware’s GA release of cloud services for Amazon Web Services (AWS), both running on vSphere code on bare metal, and native services protecting and managing EC2 instances. The key thing to remember is AWS is just the start. This is the initial release and they will add on new features and functionality as they go. VMware's future aim is to add Azure and Google to this list as well, providing the same level of VMware service and functionality across all the major cloud vendors. 

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Oracle backups have always been a challenge to manage and support given the disparate administration groups typically involved. If you are a database administrator (DBA), you need the flexibility to efficiently create backups and run restores for development cycles and upgrades. Backup administrators need to balance the backup schedule with resources and prioritized data.

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How do you know if your NetBackup Domain has become too large? 

When NetBackup Domains grow beyond Symantec best practices guidelines, performance and manageability can begin to degrade. During my 15 years as a NetBackup backup engineer, I’ve found that the following 5 criteria are worth considering:

Catalog size - As the catalog grows, the time required to protect it can become excessive. The catalog backup is a database backup. The synchronization checkpoints and locking required for other NetBackup jobs will cause extra processing time.

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The addition of Storage Lifecycle Policies (SLP’s) in Symantec NetBackup 7.6 has provided backup administrators with a very effective tool for managing backup/snapshot, image, duplication, and replication.

While SLP’s simplify these tasks, careful consideration is required when you’re monitoring and managing the policies and the components utilized in your NetBackup environment.

The SLP administration window we all know and love, shown below, is a great tool for managing SLP’s. But there are other things you should consider to help manage your SLP’s.


To help manage your SLP’s and make sure they’re optimized, please consider these (8) additional configuration tips. 

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It happens all the time – a customer has a problem that’s tough to solve. I was recently asked how to best protect a virtual environment – stretched between two data centers. The customer wanted all administration through vCenter with instant recovery and the ability to meet stringent RPOs and RTOs. And the catch – they wanted the backed up data to be stored on a different vendor’s array utilizing a different protocol - NFS instead of Fibre Channel (FC) block storage.

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