Server Sales – Worst First Quarter in 12 Years
I don’t know if any of you have noticed but the first fiscal quarter of this year has been pretty bad for server sales. It doesn’t matter what the pundits say, however, it is important for all of us to save money, cut costs – but absolutely not at the expense of our backup.
Whatever else you gamble with, backup shouldn’t be one of them. IDC recently reported that server sales from January to March was the worst quarter in the dozen years that they have been releasing quarterly server figures. The current economic crisis has injected a disconcerting amount of uncertainty into the business climate. Organisations are loath to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary.
The silver lining here is that IT departments can use this opportunity to consolidate existing projects and focus on optimising existing backup systems . Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 are built on complete protection and recovery providing central management protection for both virtual and physical systems – everything from multiple virtual servers to individual directories and files; a new generation of data protection management tools, powered by Altiris technology, for both Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery.
BE delivers unmatched granular recovery capabilities for Exchange, Active Directory and SharePoint environments reducing the overheads associated with managing Exchange mailbox backups, restoring Active Directory user preferences and attributes without multiple reboots and overall simplifying the recovery process for critical Microsoft applications.
With BE you can ensure fast, efficient recovery of individual emails or documents from a full or incremental backup. Why take the time to recovery an entire database when all you need is an individual document or email?
Backup Exec System Recovery has offered capability to quickly convert physical systems to virtual environments for several years now. BESR enables immediate system recovery to virtual systems by allowing IT administrators to schedule physical to virtual conversions. Through a virtual conversion wizard an IT administrator can schedule P2V conversions to occur monthly, daily, weekly even hourly if desired so that in the event of a failure, you have a virtual system ready to go. In addition to dramatically reducing system downtime, this reduces management time and set-up for IT organisations as well.
Also new to this release is support for the latest virtual environments including VMware ESX 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer 4.x (when using VMDK or VHD file types). When you add this functionality to the off-site copy capability it really helps organisations address their disaster recovery needs.
If someone wants a high availability solution without investing in a lot of clustering or replication software that are outside their budget BESR technology is a great way to copy these images to other locations, convert them on a schedule, and if the original server goes down those images can be brought up immediately for high availability purposes.
IT has to make do with what they have – what they need to do is make sure that they are “making do” as efficiently as possible, tweaking here and there, centralising management, adding agents and options to optimise the backup and recovery of critical data and applications and slim-lining processes to improve backup process efficiencies.
You might want to take another look at Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery …
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
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