Even EastEnders’ Backup
So why aren’t you?
The UK TV soap “EastEnders’” is creating a ‘back-up’ tape in case of crisis. The UK soap is coming up for its 25th anniversary. To celebrate the BBC are putting on a “live” episode … which strikes me in the first instance as madness. I mean, if you don’t have to, why make things difficult for yourself? Mind you, this is what we do all the time – business is permanently “live”. Anyway The Beeb (BBC TV) will shoot a back-up tape – just in case anything should fall foul during the live episode.
Makes sense to me … the tape will only be played if something goes ’seriously wrong’ during the live broadcast on Friday 19th February, the date of the soap’s 25th anniversary. As with most of these long running programmes there will be a cliff-hanger scene and a “reveal”, I think they call it, scene.
The idea is that the soap’s team will film the rehearsal, including the various versions of the “reveal” scene, so that should something goes seriously wrong, they can play the tape.
Sounds like tape backup to me … Isn’t this what we do for our businesses? Executive producer Diederick Santer is quoted as saying, “But we won’t be using it if anyone just fluffs a line or missed a cue. In those cases, we’ll power on using our improvisational skills. It’s really just for technical back-up in case of a proper crisis.”
Although the soap will only use the backup tapes if something seriously goes wrong we, in business, have the ability to restore individual files should we “fluff a line”. By deploying both best-of-breed data protection and best-of-breed system recovery solutions, enterprises are in a better position to keep their business up, running.
For many companies, protecting remote office data can be a challenge. Companies may perform tape backups at each remote office, but this approach can be unreliable, cumbersome, and expensive. The alternative method, creating backups over a WAN, also poses problems because of the amount of data and the cost of bandwidth. Technologies like deduplication and/or archiving addresses these hurdles and helps companies to efficiently manage and protect remote office data.
Backup Exec Training
You may have noticed a bit of a noise around the new version of Backup Exec this last week. Launched on Monday 25th January, Backup Exec 2010 has created a considerable amount of interest in the European, Middle East and African regions where there are a number (actually a huge number) of partner and customer training events going on. These events will cover new features in BE 2010, like deduplication and archiving, as well as covering how Backup Exec can help reduce storage costs and improve data lifecycle management with new, innovative technology to help our customers “Protect More, Store Less and Save More”.
In the UK the Symantec team are hosting a Backup Exec Tech Night for our partner community giving partners a chance to see for themselves what the new features of Backup Exec can do, with live demos. We have a Director from the Product Management Team, Herve Lequippe, over from Paris and with our technical specialists will also be on hand to answer any questions that our partners may have.
The night will also take a slightly unusual format to our normal events. It is themed’ Warm up for the World Cup’. The partners can come along and take part in a football gaming night all accompanied by Beer and Pizza! What could be better? Learn about BE 2010 and take on your colleagues in a gaming challenge. I would really encourage you to come along as it is likely to be a great night.
If you would like to attend please register by visiting: https://symantecevents.verite.com/16471
So, the new version is generally available today (1st February 2010) and in order not to miss out on all the events going on around the region, I would urge you to contact your local IT partner or Symantec office to find out more.
Introducing Backup Exec 2010
Today is a big day for us at Symantec – huge launch of our backup products, NetBackup 7 and Backup Exec 2010, offering a unified backup and recovery portfolio that reaches from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises.
We are really excited about this launch which must be one of the most significant in the last few years, and there is a considerable amount of interest in the industry.
Businesses today rely on information technology and systems to run their businesses; help to drive new opportunities; operate efficiently and comply appropriately with governance. Most organisations today are organised around servers, storage and applications with islands of static information. The sheer volume of data and its continued growth means that IT is struggling to keep up with growth with the added pressure to do more with less.
The new products are really impressive with integrated deduplication everywhere and archiving, reducing the complexity of storage management, as well as centralised information management and enhanced virtualisation capabilities.
Small Business: Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 provide a simple, cost-effective backup and recovery solution that helps minimise downtime and avoid disaster by easily recovering individual data files/folders or complete Windows systems in minutes even to different hardware, virtual environments, or remote locations – for a multitude of SB environments.
Small and Medium Businesses: Symantec delivers reliable backup and recovery designed for growing businesses. Backup Exec 2010 helps protect more, store less and save more by reducing storage and management costs through integrated deduplication and archiving technology on both virtual or physical systems.
Enterprise: Symantec NetBackup 7 simplifies the protection of heterogeneous enterprise information by automating advanced technologies across applications, platforms, and virtual environments. Integrated deduplication, replication, and virtual machine protection improves storage efficiency, infrastructure use, and recovery times through one console.
Benefits of Next Generation Information Management from Symantec
- Reduce Costs: Gain 10-20 percent net savings from a single platform
- Recover data up to 5 times faster for less downtime
- Reduce unstructured data storage 40-60%
- Compress remote office backups up to 95%
- Protect virtual and physical machines
It doesn’t matter what is the issue – the answer is Symantec!
General availablity 1st February 2010
New support for Windows 2008 R2
I’m at to TechED in Berlin … great party for the fall of the Berlin Wall 2009 (shameful timing) – once again Microsoft mess up my weekend. Windows Server 2008 R2 is pretty bold and it will have a significant impact on the market. Piles of guys I have spoken to are interested in the new capabilities.
There are some significant features in the R2 operating system that can help to boost productivity and help administrators gain more management control. It will be of specific interest to companies that have an extensive investment, or plans a complex deployment, of Hyper-V-based virtualisation; any company that has vast swaths of Windows servers in data centres where space, power or both are becoming tight; as well as any company that is planning to deploy Windows 7 on a wide scale in the near future.
In terms of support for R2 BE is already there with Backup Exec 12.5 for Windows Servers revision 2213 Hotfix 331998. This hot-fix contains recommended fixes for Backup Exec for Windows Servers version 12.5 revision 2213. New support for Windows 2008 R2 (RAWS – Remote Agent Support Only) and a Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure fix (AVVI).
Affected versions
- Backup Exec 12.5 revision 2213 32bit Media Servers
- Backup Exec 12.5 revision 2213 x64bit Media Servers
Prerequisites
Before installing this hotfix, Backup Exec for Windows 12.5 Service Pack 2 must be installed. Service Pack 2 can be obtained here: http://library.veritas.com/docs/334937. Administrative privileges are required to install this hotfix.
Post requisites
A full backup is recommended after installing this hotfix. Backup Exec Remote Agents must be updated
Download links
- Backup Exec 12.5 or Windows Servers revision 2213 Hotfix 327135 – 32 bit download: http://support.veritas.com/docs/334937
- Backup Exec 12.5 for Windows Servers revision 2213 Hotfix 327135 – 64 bit download: http://support.veritas.com/docs/334938
Issue(s) resolved
After applying Backup Exec 12.5 Hotfix 328462, an Agent for VMWare Virtual Infrastructure (AVVI) backup job with the “Granular Recovery Technology” (GRT) option enabled, completes with the exception “Failed to mount one or more virtual disk images” (For more details please refer to this document: http://support.veritas.com/docs/331927)
Installation Guide – The installation guide here contains general information for installing Backup Exec product updates as well as special instructions for configurations including CPS, Remote Agents for Windows Servers, Remote Agent for Linux/Unix/Macintosh Server (RALUS/RAMS), Clustered Backup Exec, Shared Storage (SSO) installations, Central Admin Servers (CASO) installations, and SAP/R3 Oracle Agents. http://support.veritas.com/docs/300795
BE vs Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM)
A good number of people have been asking me about DPM recently and I’d just like to set the record straight.
DPM delivers backup and recovery, continuous data protection for Microsoft application and file servers for disk and tape media. DPM protects Windows Servers by capturing data changes with application-aware, block-level agents, providing a disk and tape data protection solution. – or so they say!
Granular Recovery Technology (GRT)
Allows for the recovery of individual emails from Full, Incremental or Continuous backups of Exchange.
DPM can recover individual email messages and mailboxes too. But it is a two step process not fully managed by DPM. DMP can restore the mailbox but then the user has to recover individual items manually using exMerge.
Backup Exec protects both continuously and traditionally, as well as giving the users the ability to recover anything from a single mail message, a mailbox or the entire Exchange database – automatically.
Application / Platform Support
Allows for the protection of critical applications with specific focus on the needs of the business.
DPM can only protect Windows resources.
Backup Exec supports other Operating Systems (not just Windows), various forms of Unix, Linux, NetWare and even MAC OSX. BE also protects non-Microsoft applications such as Oracle, Lotus Notes, DB/2 and SAP as well as remote users (BE can do this with users either connected or disconnected to the network – DPM needs users to be connected and accessible to the DPM server.
Integration with Archiving and Anti-Virus / Security Software
Integration with other software allows a solution to provide additional benefits and be more effective.
DPM supports running concurrently with most Archiving and Anti-Virus software in the market today; although provide no direct integration.
Backup Exec offers direct integration with Anti-Virus software. ThreatCon initiated backup allows BE to monitor the threat landscape, should the ThreatCon level rise to critical levels. Backup Exec System Recovery enhances the overall solution not only for Data Protection for small businesses and/or laptops and desktops, but server System Recovery as well.
Pedigree, Market Share and Brand
Any kind of solution should be fit for purpose, the best solution for the business.
Microsoft is the leading name in IT – however, how many people have heard of DPM? It’s not core to Microsoft’s business or skills for that matter
Symantec is the leader in the backup market with 20 years experience (Microsoft 2years at best). 47% of the world businesses are backed up with Symantec products. BE has 2 million customers worldwide – how many does Microsoft DMP have? What have Microsoft used to back up their critical data and applications themselves for the past 10 years or so? That would be Backup Exec!
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Symantec is simply Best of Breed in security, availability and compliance from the Desktop to the Data Centre. Symantec is way out in the lead in Data Protection with a 25% lead ahead of the next provider – IBM. Microsoft as a niche player in each of these markets – they really don’t do a good job, but they do make us think that what they do it “good enough”.
Whatever Microsoft are offering not only is it NOT “good Enough” but it won’t be free either.
Storage Expo
I’ve been pretty busy in the last couple of days demonstrating outside Olympia (http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/10/14/238126/anti-upgrade-demonstration-at-storage-expo.htm); on a couple of speaker panels (one on Data Centre trends and the other on Thin Provisioning); speaking to customers and partners and generally not getting enough sleep.
Although it seems that there were fewer attendees than previous years the quality was so much better. Frankly, for the first time ever, no one asked me how to configure their Norton 360 home PC product (for which I am eternally grateful because I know as much about Norton as most home users). No, this year every conversation I had was pretty specific about how to get more out of IT assets, which was handy as that’s what we do at Symantec.
The hardware vendors had a tough time – storage infrastructures desperately need to be optimised and consolidated. Backups need to be architected around the business requirements and specific infrastructures with centralised management and automated processes.
Backup Exec System Recovery was a hot topic. Virtually every conversation I had came back to: “How do I get a simple, cost effective DR process for my servers and desktops and laptops?” The answer is, of course, BESR. Actually, when it comes to backup, whatever the question, the answer is invariably The Backup Exec Family.
What does Data Domain mean to EMC?
I don’t know about you but I’ve been following the EMC vs NetApps Data Domain saga with some interest. Well, the waiting eventually ended with EMC stealing Data Domain from under NetApps nose for a measly $2.4B ( a mere bagatelle?). Earlier this year EMC announced the pulling together of all its “data reduction” technologies to give it some sort of coherence. A great strategy but one that is pretty difficult to accomplish with so many disparate technologies in the EMC portfolio. By adding Data Domain to the mix the chances of this happening gets even more unlikely. Which is unfortunate when you consider that for most customers date deduplication is a pretty important requirement.
In reality it is important for EMC to ensure that the substantial Data Domain/EMC integration effort will take precedence to short term data deduplication integration and so EMC will do whatever it takes to show how effortlessly the integration of Data Domain has been. Data Domain sales teams are likely to be incredibly aggressive pushing their deduplication capabilities at the expense of everything. I would be pretty careful about what you purchase from EMC and why.
From Symantec’s point of view Backup Exec is looking to manage all these points. For BE customers it’s going to be dead simple. If your problem is you want to improve recovery and manage tape and disk based backup, as well as system recovery and virtualisation technologies and you’ve already got Backup Exec you will be able to simply plug a solution into your existing processes using an agent for deduplication. Remember, if you are considering moving your backup solution to anything but BE you’ll have to do some serious thinking about your backup architecture and you’ll not be simply plugging into your existing backup software.
The conversations you should be having with your IT partner are around strategic fit. What’s the right technology to solve my business problem. You need a tool that does the job or all the jobs you need it to do. Not something that falls short in one or more areas . So, whatever the question is … the answer is The Backup Exec Family.
One-step Recovery
A typical server environment consists of the main servers, drive arrays (which may or may not be directly attached to their respective servers), and disk- and tape-based backup servers. The most common IT assets are typically: patch panel, switches, secondary UPS, switch box, monitor and keyboard, blade servers, drive arrays and tape systems. Server storage devices hold organisational applications and operating systems in some partitions and documents in others.
Like any system servers are subject to a range of threats as well as maintenance which can include:
- Server Crash
- End users can easily overwrite or delete important documents
- Applications need updating
- Operating systems must be patched – perhaps tested in a virtual environment
- Upgrade new server platforms
- Malicious code can penetrate defences and attack data, applications, and operating systems
- and can even get backed up if it is not found before the next backup cycle
- Storage systems wear out and must be replaced
- Drive Array just failed – a hard drive can fail, or hardware can require an upgrade, when there is no matching hardware to which it can be restored
- The entire facility can be shut down due to a biohazard or natural disaster
- An important user whose work requires frequent backups can be added to the network without
- proper notification
Given the likelihood that everyone is going to be faced with a number of these issues (probably imminently) what can you do when a system fails? Backup Exec System Recovery enables organisations to recover from system loss in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware and virtual environments, as well as having functionality to automate physical-to-virtual conversions for immediate system recovery.
BESR provides system restore or full “bare-metal” recovery for servers, desktops, or laptops. It also enables you to recover systems in remote, unattended locations. By capturing a recovery point of the entire Windows system, including: operating system, applications, system settings, configurations, and files, BESR can save this recovery point to: SAN, NAS, direct-attached storage, RAID, CD/DVD, and copied to FTP servers or secondary disk devices, as part of the same backup job.
The BESR Granular Restore Option restores individual Microsoft Exchange email messages, folders, and mailboxes from backups taken from Exchange servers; restore SharePoint documents from backups taken from servers running SharePoint Server or SharePoint Services; or recover files and folders in seconds.
With centralised deployment, modification, and maintenance, BESR supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Small Business Server 2008, Essential Business Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 as well as VMware ESX 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer 4.x.
Simple, comprehensive, improving system availability, disaster recovery and risk management – you know it makes sense!
Special pricing on Backup Exec 12.5 Virtual Agents!
Extended to October 2nd, 2009 Upgrade to Backup Exec 12.5 or switch from a competitor’s solution and save up to 35% of MSRP on Backup Exec 12.5 virtual agents for VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Comprehensive Data Protection for VMware Infrastructures and Microsoft Virtual Servers
How are you backing up your virtual environment today? Are you applying an antiquated and time consuming backup approach to your new virtual server environment? Having to juggle multiple agents to protect your virtual machines while also managing different backup products for both your physical and virtual environments can be painful.
Expanded virtual server data protection with two new virtual Agents! Backup Exec Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructures and Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft Virtual Servers (including Hyper-V)
- Quickly restore virtual server files and folders from a single pass backup – save time and storage costs by eliminating a redundant file level backup
- Easily backup an unlimited number of virtual guest machines to disk or tape for added flexibility and savings
- Fast, efficient data protection for physical and virtual server environments from a single console
The BE 12.5 Agent for Microsoft Virtual Servers (AVVI) provides a single agent to support an unlimited number of virtual guests running on a Windows Server 2008 machines while protecting existing physical server files and Windows applications. Backup Exec 12.5 can quickly restore individual virtual files and folders from a single image-level backup – eliminating the time and storage requirements of a second file level backup
- Complete Windows data protection for new Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V systems and virtual systems running Windows Server 2000 and 2003 environments
- One agent delivering affordable data protection to an unlimited number of Microsoft virtual systems
- Comprehensive backup application for virtual systems and physical systems supporting disk and tape storage environments
Improve Performance with BE 12.5, Service Pack 2
Did anyone notice the rather impressive Backup Exec test report on SP2 that came out in May (the Service Pack came out in May and the Report in June) … to be precise. BE 12.5 SP2 went GA on 18th May via FileConnect. The whole point of SP2 was to improve speed and performance of Backup Exec. It also had a few new fixes and enhancements, but was mainly to provide enhanced performance for 12.5 and earlier versions.
Backup Performance Is Important
All backup jobs have some performance impact on the system that is being backed up. We have been living with such phrases as “The Shrinking Backup Window” for this very reason – and for years. Inevitably, for the period of time that a system is being backed up, the hard drive is busy reading files in order to carry out the backup. You usually have to run this type of process when it is less likely to impact the system, when the IT bandwidth is not needed for other business processes – over night, or at the weekend for example when other system resources are minimal and the backup job will have the least amount of interference on normal business operations.
If, however, a backup job overruns its allotted backup window you have to decide if it is more important to continue with the backup and lengthen the backup window or abort the backup altogether. By improving backup performance IT is more likely to be able to maintain overall business productivity, and perhaps even reduce their backup windows. Which is a good thing.
Last year we ran a small survey (1,000 respondents) to a bunch of customers who were using legacy versions of BE and discovered that over 50% named “performance” and “speed” as major key influencing factors that would drive them to upgrade. What was interesting was that a large proportion of these BE customers were unaware of all the enhancements we’ve made to BE over the past few years – not just performance.
So Symantec tested SP2 against previous versions of BE and came up with some pretty impressive results:
Compared to prior versions of Backup Exec, Backup Exec 12.5 with SP2 provides:
- 40 percent plus performance improvement in backup transfer rates of a Windows Server® 2003 OS Volume
- 70 percent performance improvement in backup transfer rates of a Windows Server® 2008 OS Volume
- 100 percent performance improvement in incremental backup of Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and 2007
The conclusion is that BE 12.5 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides faster backup times compared to previous versions of the product. By upgrading to BE 12.5 with SP2, you can dramatically improve your backup speeds and overall performance, reduce backup windows, and maintain business productivity. Not only that but you will gain a considerable range of enhanced features and functions, such as optimised Microsoft application recovery, granular recovery, virtual machine protection and enhanced system protection.
Hurrah!
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