Deduplication – is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who cares?
Actually, I’ve discovered it’s not just me – thank goodness. When you go through a product launch process there is always a chance that the general ”noise” is you banging on about stuff and is limited to inside your own head.
Not so in BE 2010 case … I’ve been running around Europe in the last month or so, and the feedback I’ve been getting is that there is an awful amount of interest in deduplication. Even smaller companies who thought that deduplication was probably too much for their needs are seriously looking at getting rid of some of the duplicate data on their primary storage, but even more are looking at deduplication as a way of improving backup and restore times.
I was at an event a couple of months back where every conversation I had was around the length of time it takes to backup. As data continues to grow across the IT infrastructure, everywhere: laptops, disparate storage devices, remote offices, as well as the good old Data Centre, it has created a fundamental shift in the way organisations need to manage information. Keeping information on disk for faster DR restores is all fine and dandy, but there is simply too much data around. Disk based backup is now getting a tricky to manage and as cumbersome as tape-based backup.
A number of customers are turning to deduplication technologies in order to facilitate faster backups, reduce primary storage, and reduce not just the amount of disk being used up but also improve tape media rotation and management.
Deduplication gives you the ability to tape a strategic approach to storage and backups. Organisations now have the ability to deploy an integrated platform that is easy to manage and supports source and target-based deduplication.
Primary storage deduplication will become widely deployed in the next 6 to 12 months. Most organisations have not yet gone down this route, however, with the Option now built into Backup Exec 2010 this is all the more likely because it’s available simply, really easy to install and the benefits are huge.
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
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!
Enterprise Vault and Backup Exec
Backup Exec 12.5 released an Agent for Enterprise Vault, which is designed to offer complete protection for Enterprise Vault 7.5 implementations. When Enterprise Vault 8.0 was released, architectural changes in EV 8.0 made the Backup Exec 12.5 Agent for Enterprise Vault unable to automatically protect all aspects of Enterprise Vault. An integrated solution will be in the next version of BE. In the meantime …
For customers who have not purchased the Agent for Enterprise Vault, and wish to protect Enterprise Vault manually with a combination of Backup Exec Agent for SQL Server and Agent for Windows Systems, refer to the following Tech Note: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/312327.htm
The Backup Exec 12.5 Agent for Enterprise Vault contains all of the building blocks necessary to protect Enterprise Vault 8.0. Customers who have purchased the Agent for Enterprise Vault do not need to purchase any additional Agents/Options to fully protect Enterprise Vault with Backup
The following procedure will create several jobs which will result in complete protection for the Enterprise Vault 8.0 infrastructure.
Step 1
When the Agent for Enterprise Vault is installed on each member server in the Enterprise Vault infrastructure, the Enterprise Vault entities shown in the Backup Browse view will form the core of the first job. From the Backup View, expand the “Enterprise Vault” icon, and select the Sites,
Vault Stores, Vault Store Databases, Partitions, Index Locations, Directory Databases, and Monitoring Databases to be backed up in this first job.
This will create a single job that protects these specific entities. This job will keep the EV Services in read-only mode for database consistency purposes.
Step 2
Create a series of SQL jobs to protect the additional databases introduced in EV 8.0. These databases are the Auditing Database (AuditDB), the FSA Reporting Database (FSAReportingDB), Fingerprint Database (FingerPrintDB), Compliance Accelerator, and Discovery Accelerator databases.
Administrators will need to browse to the appropriate physical server where these databases run in order to select them for protection. The Agent for Enterprise Vault must be licensed and the Remote Agent for Windows Systems must to be installed on any system that hosts an Enterprise Vault database.
These databases do not require Enterprise Vault to be put into ReadOnly or backup mode, and as such can be protected while they are online. The Agent for Enterprise Vault includes all features and functions necessary to consistently protect running Microsoft SQL databases.
1. Create a SQL backup job to protect the Auditing Database (EnterpriseVaultAudit) and the FSA Reporting Database (EnterpriseVaultFSAReporting)
a. Use Full or Incremental (backup transaction log and truncate) backup method.
2. Create a SQL backup job to protect the Fingerprint Database and ExpressVaultStore Databases
a. Use Full, Differential, or incremental (backup transaction log and truncate) backup method.
b. Symantec advises customers to backup the FingerPrint databases after every VaultStore backup. This is to ensure that backup copies of the Fingerprint Database and the physical VaultStore are consistent. In case of a recovery, the closer the FingerPrint Databases and VaultStores are in time will make for a faster recovery process.
3. Create a SQL backup job to backup Compliance Accelerator and Discovery Accelerator databases (i.e. ConfigurationDB, CustomerDB and CustodianDB) if present.
a. Protect Configuration, Customer, Custodian, and other databases using Full, Differential, or Incremental (backup transaction log and truncate) backup methods.
A Few Things …
1. BE SP2 Release
There are a number of fixes around GRT including up to a 90% decrease in the time taken to run an incremental GRT backup. Please see the following technote which provides links to and details around the changes and fixes in SP2
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/324918.htm
Release notes are here:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/323735.htm
2. You know I keep banging on about AD … well it’s not just me:
Optimizing Exchange and Active Directory Backup and Recovery – Thursday, 28 May 2009, Written by Pat Hanavan
http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2855&Itemid=40
… and Pat seems to express the whole subject rather better than I do …
3. Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 Technical Exam and Assessment
Although each product varies in complexity and depth of technical knowledge, all Symantec Technical Specialist accreditation exams (not to be confused with customer certification), are designed for partners and cover core elements measuring technical knowledge against factors such as planning, installation, implementation and high level troubleshooting. Symantec Partners: See Symantec University for Partners and product Training Path to access the exam and recommended courses.
4. Backup Exec 12.5 Video Product Review by David Strom
The video highlights the key features/benefits of the product.
youtube.com – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DhrpeQ9jAM
Date Posted: February 23, 09
Top 10 Technotes searched …
I thought it might be of some interest for you to see what everyone is accessing on the Symantec Support Site.
So, here are the top 10 technotes searches …
|
Technote |
Description |
| How to troubleshoot issues with a Robotic Library or Tape Drive in Backup Exec for Windows Servers. | |
| When attempting to run a backup job “Physical Volume Library Drive not available” Error occurs | |
| “Corrupt data encountered” (a000fe36 HEX or e000fe36 HEX) is reported when a backup job fails. | |
| Symantec Backup Exec ™ 10.1 (10d) for Windows Servers revision 5629 – Service Pack 3 – Includes Critical Security Updates | |
| Symantec Backup Exec ™ 10.1 (10d) for Windows Servers revision 5629 – Service Pack 4 – Includes Critical Security Updates | |
| How to backup Exchange 2007 with Backup Exec for Windows Servers (BEWS) | |
| How to troubleshoot the error “A failure occurred querying the Writer status” (a000fed1 HEX or e000fed1 HEX or 0xfffffed1 HEX) using VSSADMIN | |
| Backup fails with the error “AOFO: Initialization failure on: “\\\Shadow?Copy?Components“. Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Snapshot provider error (0x8007000E): Ran out of memory” | |
| Granular Restore Technology (GRT) Backup of an Exchange Information Store fails with error “Cannot log on to MAPI with the specified credentials” | |
| Backup Exec for Windows Servers – Snapshot provider error (0xE000FED1) A failure occurred querying the Writer status when backing up Exchange 2007. | |
| How to perform a local installation of the Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Servers or the Advanced Open File Option | |
| Backup of a Microsoft Exchange Information Store fails with error “V-79-57344-33928 – Access Denied. Cannot backup directory mailbox database and its subdirectories” | |
| Backup or restore job fails with Final error: 0xe00084ed – A hardware error has occurred. |
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Polls
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