Vox Shell July00-3 - Storiestravelsvisions

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T H E V O I C E O F V E R I T A S ™ I s s u e 3.2 Special Section: Replication Technologies The VERITAS, Oracle, Sun Initiative: Integrated Solutions for Customers NEW! SAN Solutions for Optimum Performance and High Availability NEW! VERITAS NetBackup™ Family for Data Protection from the Global Enterprise to the Mobile Laptop NEW! VERITAS Remote Storage™ for Microsoft Exchange Environments B U S I N E S S W I T H O U T I N T E R R U P T I O N™ TABLE OF CONTENTS | CHAIRMAN’S CORNER | Mark Leslie, VERITAS Software CEO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Editor Chris Lemoine ([email protected]) Design Sarah Hardy ([email protected]) VERITAS Marketing Communications Creative Services 400 International Parkway Heathrow, Florida 32746 Contriibuting illustrations by Creative Services designers Robert Kammel and James Poole Comments or Questions Send e-mail to [email protected] for comments or questions regarding VOX VERITAS or to receive your free subscription. VOX VERITAS magazine is published quarterly by VERITAS Software Corporation, 1600 Plymouth Street, Mountain View, CA 94043. No part of this publication may be reprinted or otherwise reproduced without permission from the editor. VERITAS Software does not provide any warranty as to the accuracy of any information provided through VOX VERITAS magazine. VERITAS Software shall not be liable for any damages incurred as a result of reliance on any information provided herein. © 2000 VERITAS Software Corp. All rights reserved. VERITAS is a registered trademark of VERITAS Software in the U.S. and other countries. The VERITAS logo is a trademark of VERITAS Software in the U.S. and other countries. VERITAS products and services are registered trademarks or trademarks of VERITAS Software. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Printed in U.S.A. August 2000. | DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING | What to Do When What Shouldn’t Happen, Does . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 | SPECIAL SECTION: Replication Technology | Replication Matters: A Critical Element in Enterprise Disaster Recovery Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Choosing Replication Solutions to Increase Availability of Business Critical Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Bringing High Availability to Disaster Recovery: Interview with Brooks Graham, part 1 of 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 | SOLUTIONS | VERITAS NetBackup™ 3.4 Now Released in DataCenter and BusinesServer™ Editions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 VERITAS NetBackup Professional™: Centralizing Backup and Simplifying Recovery for Distributed Client Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 VERITAS Software and IBM Sign Agreement to Deliver Storage Management Solutions for AIX/Monterey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 VERITAS Backup Exec™ Novell Competitive Migration Suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 VERITAS VISION2000 Worldwide User’s Conference . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 VOS: The VERITAS, Oracle and Sun Initiative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 VERITAS Remote Storage™ for Microsoft Exchange: Optimal Space Management of Exchange Databases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Hewlett Packard and VERITAS Software Partner on Zero Downtime Backup Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 | SAN SOLUTIONS | Eight Features of Highly Successful SAN Data Storage Management: VERITAS SANPoint™ Storage Appliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 VERITAS SANPoint™ Control: A Powerful Centralized Mangement Tool to Realize SAN Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 | NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES | VERITAS SANPoint™ Consulting: Bringing SAN Technology Home . . . . . . . . 32 VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Now Offering High Availability Consulting . . . . 34 VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services Announces ProLaunch . . . . . . . . . . 35 A Hot Summer at VERITAS Education Services (VES) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 New Service Converts UNIX File System to VERITAS File System™ . . . . . . . . 37 | VERITAS IN EUROPE |. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 | SUCCESS STORY | GMAC-RFC Uses VERITAS NetBackup™ for Efficient Data Protection in a Heterogeneous Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 | ASK THE DOCTOR | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 | NORTH AMERICAN EVENTS Calendar | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 2 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS CHAIRMAN’S CORNER Mark Leslie | CEO Dear Customer: Understanding and meeting your needs drives VERITAS to continuously reinvent itself. This motivation encompasses our products, services and all aspects of how we approach the market. Following the completion of our five year business strategy to become the data storage management software leader for both UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT/2000 environments, we have developed an extended business vision that focuses on data availability as a broader market category for storage management software. Customers, partners, investors and the public will come to know and recognize us as “The Data Availability Company.” As part of this new vision, VERITAS is implementing several new business initiatives that will enhance and leverage our leadership position in the four core business areas of products and technologies, platform support and strategic partnerships, sales and distribution, and worldwide technical and professional services. This is a direct continuation of our development after the very successful merger and integration with the Seagate Software NSMG Group, which happened only a little over a year ago. VERITAS’ new business initiatives for products and technology include: services, and with the aggressive exploration of new and emerging technologies. Internet Business – This initiative focuses on the dramatically growing dot-com and e-business markets. It will identify, build, market and distribute a number of existing and new products to assist e-business customers in maintaining 24-by-forever uptime. VERITAS E-Business Channel – As in all industries, web-based marketing and sales are dramatically changing old ideas about distribution. With our e-business initiative, we will build an electronic distribution channel to equal the reach and efficiency of our other distribution channels. Network Attached Storage (NAS) /Linux Market – Our NAS/Linux initiative places added focus on activities that will allow us to build products with real and immediate market value to capture the sizeable opportunity for NAS/Linux technologies that manage large volumes of data. VERITAS’ new business initiatives in the worldwide technical and professional services include: VERITAS’ new business initiatives for platform support and strategic partnership include: Hewlett Packard Market – The HP market, largely untapped, has significant growth potential for VERITAS. This initiative is centered on seizing this market by defining, building and marketing versions of VERITAS Software products that meet the needs specific to the HP marketplace. Windows NT and Windows 2000 Market – VERITAS is a long-standing partner of Microsoft. This initiative brings additional attention and investments to the Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating platforms and related partners. We will offer more and more products and solutions to customers as Windows 2000 rolls out across enterprises. VERITAS Software’s new business initiatives in the sales and distribution model include: Desktop and Mobile User Market – Through our acquisition of Seagate Software, NSMG, we have been in the personal storage management market for desktop and mobile users for more than ten years. Now we are actively approaching this large group of customers with expanded distribution vehicles, new and enhanced products and Professional Services – As storage management technologies become more critical, so does the need for expert technical consulting to properly deploy and manage them. This initiative is expanding our consulting group into an enterprise level, solutions-oriented organization that will act as a key business partner in the development of comprehensive solutions for our customers. Each new business initiative is being carried out by a dedicated group of employees that understand what customers need to be successful in their specific area. In addition to these efforts, we are also embarking upon a global branding campaign to increase awareness of our name and technology. You will see more of VERITAS than ever before. However, even with all of the new directions we are moving in, our goal is to be as responsive to you as we have been in the past, if not more so. I look forward to seeing you at VERITAS Vision, our Worldwide Users Conference in Las Vegas this October. Sincerely, Mark Leslie CEO, President and Chairman of the Board VERITAS Software Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 3 DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING What to Do When What Shouldn’t Happen, Does! Some Concepts in Disaster Recovery By Cathy Won, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager W ith the booming economy of e-business and the explosive growth of data associated with it comes the need for more thorough disaster recovery planning. Typically, people think of disaster recovery planning as protection against such natural troubles as fires, earthquakes, and floods. We tend to forget that the most common disasters happen right in our backyards, for example: ▼ Computer and internet crime ▼ Computer viruses ▼ Power outages ▼ Telecommunications and network failures ▼ ▼ A few hours of downtime can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue for some companies. For example, a retail brokerage, according to Contingency Planning, can lose as much as $6.5 million per hour, not to mention the impacts of future lost revenue. Businesses need to plan their response to events that have the potential of data loss in order to protect business continuance and critical data, minimize the impact of any disastrous events that may happen, and use their resources wisely. Some of the key objectives of a good disaster recovery plan are to: ▼ Minimize economic loss ▼ Provide a plan for a safe and orderly recovery in the event of a disaster Hardware and software breakdowns Human error Disasters can disrupt business goals in seconds and destroy a company’s viability altogether. Suddenly, a business is impacted in 4 its operational viability, revenues, customer confidence and competitiveness, among other issues. According to an article in Contingency Planning, the US Labor Department reports that 43% of the companies that have experienced a disaster never reopen. 29% of them close within 2 years. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS ▼ Protect the assets of the company ▼ Minimize decision making during a disaster ▼ Reduce reliance on certain key individuals ▼ Determine most critical applications and data The critical factors of this are planning on the right amount of protection while evaluating and balancing the risk. It is also important to have tools that are flexible enough to adapt to changing needs. Today it is not uncommon for companies to go through drastic changes in their computing environments in just a few months as they accommodate rapid growth. Studies show that business planning cycles have gone from about three to five years to less than a year today. Businesses need to regularly revisit their needs to ensure they are still disaster tolerant. Disaster recovery planning is the creation of a comprehensive plan for the event of any kind of disaster that can occur to a company. Generally it is true that the more protection, the less the risk, but costs go up as well. Risk assessment and effective protection need to be evaluated as they relate to cost. The highest investments may not necessarily bring the most significant returns for businesses in need of protection. Where and how, then, should disaster recovery planning start? Backup and recovery are without doubt the foundation for any disaster recovery plan. Businesses need to be sure they have backup tapes stored offsite as a minimum effort, while also keeping copies of the most recent backup tapes on site. The VERITAS backup and recovery DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING product families have tape duplication capabilities that make planning for offsite tape storage easier by providing two copies of the backup tapes, one to be kept onsite for a minor disaster and one kept offsite for a site disaster. The VERITAS backup and recovery product families offer many other strong features that cannot be found in other backup and recovery products. Talking about VERITAS NetBackup™, for example, they include tape de-multiplexing for producing faster recovery tapes and gnu/tar format non-proprietary tapes. The tape-copying feature that produces the gnu/tar format tapes enables files to be recovered on systems that do not even have VERITAS NetBackup installed. Tapes in gnu/tar format for UNIX thus allow data managers to recover files fast without going through a NetBackup installation at a sensitive time. Additionally, for Windows NT/2000 systems, the Intelligent Disaster Recovery™ (IDR) feature of both NetBackup and VERITAS Backup Exec™ provides an optimal solution for performing “bare metal restore.” IDR allows for a streamlined approach to recovering a server, by reducing the number of steps by 50% by automating both the operating system and data recovery in one process. Yet another feature, exclusive to NetBackup, is the Vault Extension™ service that can manage the logistics of sending duplicate backup tapes to offsite vaulting facilities. Since one of the keys for disaster recovery planning is determining what the most critical applications and data are, it is necessary to analyze the types of data loss events that may occur to them. For example, most mission critical business applications rely on very large databases that contain information that is at the core of what allows the business to function. An interruption to their availability is not acceptable. Traditional backup and recovery methods are often not fast enough to handle the recovery of very large databases used by mission critical applications. That’s why many companies today implement data replication tools to keep an up to date ‘hot’ standby of their most critical data for immediate point of failure recovery. For example, VERITAS Volume Replicator™ and VERITAS File Replicator™ can be used to seamlessly replicate any database. They support data replication via a LAN or WAN, so that the replicated data can be stored far enough apart in the event of a site disaster. The advantages are that VERITAS replication technology does not use a dedicated network and is not dependent on any vendorspecific storage hardware platform. For optimal data protection of a mission critical application, replication combined with clustering gives the best protection for any disaster. VERITAS Cluster Server™ has failover capabilities that ensure that if one machine fails, another server will take over the operations of the failed server. With replication, the application can fail over to another server where the replicated data reside. Users would not even realize a problem ever occurred. VERITAS Cluster Server has cascading failover capabilities for up to 32 machines. It also allows for application resource group monitoring and migration. Finally, for a true WAN solution, VERITAS Global Cluster Manager™ provides failover capabilities between clusters in the event of a site disaster. A company’s mission critical applications can remain running by having a replicated site in any other location worldwide with clustering capabilities set so that operations from the cluster at one site can fail over to the other clustered site with the replicated data. This means that data are protected from a single server outage or a larger problem involving all servers, at any location. VERITAS File System and Volume Manager. Being fully scalable, the VERITAS solutions enable a disaster tolerant solution to grow with systems and business needs. There is no dependency on hardware platforms, since VERITAS developers build with full heterogeneity in mind. The large arrays of centralized, automated administrative tools and intuitive interfaces help to reduce the reliance on key individuals that in the event of a disaster may or may not be present - clearly one of the objectives in thorough disaster recovery planning. Smart disaster recovery planning needs to be based on skills likely to be available at the time, and must be well rehearsed so that it does not cause additional problems when it’s time to make sure computing operations and the business itself can continue. Statistics quoted in this article are from articles in Contingency Planning. You may want to read the articles with much other useful information at www.contingencyplanning.com/ article_index.cfm?article=195 and www.contingencyplanning.com/ article_index.cfm?article=141. VERITAS has a solution for protection against any type of data loss situation from global enterprises on down to single desktops and laptops in small businesses. The main advantage of deploying the complete VERITAS solution is that it is fully integrated, and that the different products truly enhance each other when used together, starting with a solid foundation including Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 5 SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY Replication Matters: A Critical Element in Enterprise Disaster Recovery Planning T o protect themselves against the fallout from data loss, many enterprises have created disaster preparedness plans that include detailed steps for the protection of data, and their recovery after a disastrous event. Successful data recovery assumes that there is an uncompromised data source with full integrity of replicated data. The data to be used in the recovery must be fully up to date, complete, and free from errors. It should allow the operation to continue to run without a significant break in continuity. To keep it removed from the impact of a disastrous event, it makes good sense for recovery data to be replicated and stored in a different geographical location than the primary data storage. Some businesses contract with an external data storage provider for this purpose, but most will want to fully implement and be in control of their own strategy. To allow for failures that concern less than an entire site, and to arrive at high availability of data on a local level, the disaster recovery plan should also include a reliable clustering and data mirroring strategy. There is no doubt that replication is becoming a standard industry practice. In addition to its role in a disaster recovery plan, it also allows for additional access in a distributed file system, and off-host data processing. As the Gartner Group has found, “Use of campus-wide and wide-area shadowing and mirroring technology will increase in large enterprises from less than 5% today to 25% by year-end 2000 (.7 probability).” The labor intensive alternatives to full replication typically do not deliver the same completeness and data integrity, because they are limited as to data copied or hardware that can be used in the process. As the world leader in the data availability business, VERITAS has several powerful solutions for replication within a business disaster recovery. VOX has not talked much about replication technology in the past. In this issue, we feature an interview with our leading expert on replication and clustering, and talk about some of the replication products VERITAS offers. We will continue the interview, and talk more about our solutions, in the next issue. VERITAS ensures that replication services remain highly available by providing agents for VERITAS Cluster Server to handle both local and wide-area (via VERITAS Global Cluster Manager) failover. 6 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY Choosing Replication Solutions to Increase Availability of Business Critical Data environment, data must be written to the target before the write operation completes on the host system. This assures the highest possible level of data integrity for the target system – at any point in time, it will have the exact same data as the source. However, synchronous replication can introduce performance delays on the source system, particularly if the network connection between the systems is slow. Some solutions combine synchronous and asynchronous operations, switching to asynchronous replication dynamically when there are problems, then reverting to synchronous when the communication problems are resolved. By Matt Fairbanks, Product Manager, Replication Products V ERITAS Software offers a number of software-based replication solutions, leveraging the company’s market leading file and volume management expertise. Software-based replication has several advantages over alternatives, including flexible configuration, simplified management, and the ability to use commodity storage hardware. This overview describes the replication solutions available from VERITAS, and gives a brief introduction to replication concepts in general. Types of replication In very general terms, data replication is the process of copying data from a source to a target server, and then maintaining the synchronization of that data. ▼ One way to distinguish different replication options is by comparing the replication configurations and types of replication offered. Configuration refers to how many source machines replicate to how many targets. One-to-one replication is the simplest, but many products also support one-to-many, many-toone, and even many-to-many configurations. The type of replication describes how the program keeps the data up to date between the two systems. A replication solution may synchronize data at scheduled intervals, or provide continuous replication, either synchronously or asynchronously. This distinction has important ramifications ▼ Synchronous replication – In a synchronous replication ▼ Asynchronous replication – Using asynchronous replication, the source system does not wait for a confirmation from the target systems before proceeding. Products may queue data and send batches of changes between the systems during periods of network availability. VERITAS solutions supporting asynchronous replication use journaling and ensure that data is written at the target in the same order it was written on the source, to maintain data integrity. Scheduled replication – For some purposes, continual replication may not be ideal. VERITAS replication products also provide scheduled replication, in which changed data is synchronized at predefined intervals. This is useful for many types of replication, such as some data publication or off-host processing implementations. Uses of Replication Data replication serves many purposes. The solution you select depends on your replication needs. Some common applications for replication include: ▼ Disaster recovery – maintaining an up-to-the-moment copy of critical data at an alternate site, to be activated only in the event of a disaster at the primary site. ▼ Off-host processing – moving critical data to a secondary server, from which to perform backups, reporting, testing, or other operations that require production data but would affect the performance of the production system. ▼ Follow-the-sun processing – maintaining local copies of critical data to support the global enterprise. ▼ Content Distribution – copying data from distributed sites to a central site (such as regional sales servers to corporate headquarters). Also gives multiple servers dynamic update capabilities to a shared pool of data. Most solutions address one or more of these applications very well – few can support all easily. VERITAS Replication Solutions VERITAS Software offers a number of different replication solutions. They vary according to the platform supported and the target use of the software. Today, we will look at the following: ▼ VERITAS Volume Replicator™ – a robust and flexible replication solution based on VERITAS Volume Manager™ ▼ VERITAS File Replicator™ – a general purpose file system replication tool which offers true bi-directional replication on Solaris platforms. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 7 SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY ▼ VERITAS Storage Replicator™ for Windows NT – a flexible, easy to manage NT-based replication solution for large-scale Windows NT environments. VERITAS Volume Replicator VERITAS Volume Replicator v3.0 gives the foundation for seamless wide area availability, site migration and disaster recovery. Whether motivated by natural disaster, site failure or simply a planned site migration, the ability to seamlessly move computing operations with minimal (or even zero) downtime has become a necessity to compete in today’s market. As an integrated feature of VERITAS Volume Manager™, VERITAS Volume Replicator reliably, efficiently and consistently mirrors data to remote locations over any IP network for maximum business continuity. Volume Replicator is an elegant, flexible, storage independent solution to deliver true disaster recovery when data currency and availability are paramount. Volume Replicator is implemented as a VERITAS Volume Manager module, and replicates data at the logical volume level. This means that replication is completely transparent to the applications involved. Whenever data is written to the replicated volume, Volume Replicator automatically sends it to one or more sites, depending on the configuration. Volume Replicator provides both synchronous and asynchronous replication. Using synchronous replication, the initial write is not committed until the data has been replicated successfully. With asynchronous replication, replication operations queue for network availability. Asynchronous replication provides the highest performance. In a “soft synchronous” mode, replication is synchronous under normal circumstances, but converts to asynchronous in the case of a temporary network outage. In all cases, replication is an ongoing, constant, and transparent activity. Building upon the VERITAS Volume Manager foundation and integrating with VERITAS Cluster Server™ and VERITAS Global Cluster Manager™, Volume Replicator becomes part of a powerful, integrated and complete solution for local and wide area high availability and disaster recovery. Volume Replicator supports a variety of replication configurations, including one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one. Key points to consider: Replication occurs at the logical volume level – it is transparent to the software and configuration is flexible. It also supports any data type, including databases stored on raw partitions. ▼ ▼ ▼ Volume Replicator works over any IP network, LAN or WAN, supporting up to 32 nodes in a replicated network. Volume Replicator insures the integrity of data on all systems, all of the time. Recommended uses for Volume Replicator With its flexible configuration and its emphasis on data integrity, Volume Replicator is ideal for solutions requiring up-to-the-minute data replication. Replicate critical information to a disastersafe site for maximum availability and data protection. 8 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS ▼ Disaster recovery – A company can maintain a replicated site at a separate geographical location, and automatically fail over applications to that site in case of a disaster or other outage. ▼ Off-host processing – Replicating a critical system with 24x7 operational requirements allows administrators to perform reporting, testing, or backups on production data without affecting production performance. ▼ Follow-the-sun processing – Global enterprises frequently optimize local system performance by implementing geographicallydispersed servers sharing the same data. With Volume Replicator, you can circle the globe with replicated data. ▼ System maintenance – You can use Volume Replicator to create an environment for continual availability. For example, you can roll applications to the replicated system while performing system maintenance tasks on the production server. VERITAS File Replicator For content distribution and replicated file systems, VERITAS File Replicator v3.0 is the perfect tool to keep multiple web and file servers fully synchronized and mounted for maximum availability and load balancing. File Replicator lets distributed servers share file systems across a local or wide area network, and is one of the few true file level replication solutions for the Solaris operating system. With VERITAS File Replicator, all replicated file systems are mounted and available for use at secondary systems at all times. Fully synchronous replication ensures that all participating nodes are totally up to date at all times. VERITAS File Replicator is the only product of its kind that can offer true bi-directional replication. This means that in a two-node configuration, both systems could both read and write to the replicated data set with complete integrity. File Replicator can also be configured to have a single master node with many read-only targets. SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY The product implements file sharing using a read-one, write-all protocol. All reads occur from the local system, but writes are distributed to all of the nodes sharing the file system. If configured for continual replication, then these writes occur synchronously (the data is written to all nodes before the write operation is completed at the source). This ensures data integrity across all nodes. Although File Replicator ensures that the replicated systems are always identical, administrators can also choose to “turn off” replication for a period of time. This would be useful when performing local testing or backups, or when there are communication problems. When replication is re-enabled, File Replicator determines the changes and resynchronizes only changed data, minimizing network traffic. Integration with VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS File System delivers additional performance and availability, although neither is a required component. Integration with VERITAS Cluster Server adds enhanced disaster recovery and failover options. Replication is independent of the transport layer, and is completely transparent to users and applications. File Replicator supports local file systems and remote NFSmounted file systems. Key points to consider with this solution: ▼ Because it works at the file system level, File Replicator does not support applications such as databases that use raw partitions. ▼ ▼ Replication is continuous and synchronous, which provides optimal data integrity and synchronization. However, if network performance is slow, then the replication will slow writes at the source. For this reason, it is best used over high bandwidth, highly reliable network configurations. Although the product supports multiple nodes, the number of systems actively writing to the shared file system will introduce more network traffic and may affect the performance of all. If you are sharing file systems with a lot of write activity, it is best to limit the number of nodes for optimal performance. Recommended Uses for File Replicator File Replicator is an easily implemented solution for replicating file systems. This has several important uses: ▼ Content Distribution – By replicating data to remote sites, data distribution increases read performance for local and remote users. ▼ Disaster Recovery – In the case of a disaster, all replicated data can be accessed from any replicated site in the network. ▼ File sharing – File Replicator allows multiple hosts to share the same file system data. VERITAS Storage Replicator for Windows NT Finally, VERITAS Storage Replicator v2.0 delivers robust, reliable data replication to Windows NT environments. Whether the requirement is for automated data distribution, disaster protection or many-to-one backup centralization, VERITAS Storage Replicator will meet the need for even the most demanding replication jobs on the Windows NT platform. The need to have files identically replicated to multiple systems is found in web load balancing environments, software distribution, or simply file servers that must be accessed from different physical locations. For sites that cannot tolerate the data loss or availability restrictions inherent in a traditional tape backup and restore scenario, a realtime replication solution like Storage Replicator is the perfect tool to ensure maximum data availability even if an entire site is inaccessible. Storage Replicator for Windows NT is very flexible; you can replicate files, volumes or directories, with configurable mapping between the source and target systems. The product supports three different replication configurations: one-toone (standard), many-to-one (consolidation), and one-to-many (publication). When Storage Replicator for Windows NT begins replication, it first synchronizes the source and target systems by copying files to the target. Once the systems are synchronized, it performs continuous, asynchronous replication, writing changed data to the target server(s). The ongoing replication uses both inbound and outbound journals; this means that it does not introduce write delays on the source system, and can recover from network failures. You can also choose to only synchronize the systems on a scheduled basis, without selecting ongoing replication. Storage Replicator for Windows NT protects network bandwidth. For example, it analyzes the data that has changed; if a file is less than one megabyte, it replicates the entire file. Otherwise, it writes only the 8K data blocks that have changed. Administrators can also restrict the bandwidth the product uses to prevent synchronization processes from swamping the network. Storage Replicator 2.0 supports Windows NT 4.0 and 3.51 Server operating systems, with support for Windows 2000 planned in an upcoming release. (The product was called Replication Exec in an earlier release.) Key points when considering Storage Replicator for Windows NT: ▼ It is a Windows NT-only solution. ▼ Replication is rules-based and highly configurable. ▼ Storage Replicator for Windows NT’s console lets you monitor and manage replication jobs from anywhere on the network. ▼ Storage Replicator 2.0 is a highly scalable solution, supporting up to 1000 nodes on a replicated network. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 9 SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY Recommended uses for Storage Replicator for Windows NT ▼ Data distribution – The one-tomany replication capabilities of Storage Replicator for Windows NT provide a means for an organization to “publish” data or applications to multiple remote sites on a regular basis. ▼ Backup consolidation – Using the many-to-one replication of Storage Replicator for Windows NT allows organizations to consolidate data from several remote servers onto one system, which then performs the backup locally. Other types of data consolidation are also possible, such as replicating data from regional sales systems to a headquarters system on a regular basis. ▼ Data Protection – One-to-one replication with Storage Replicator for Windows NT maintains an up to date replica of critical data at an offsite location. File Replicator Volume Replicator Storage Replicator for Windows NT Platform Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 Solaris 2.6 or 7 (Solaris 8 with V3.1) Windows NT 3.51 or 4 (Windows 2000 in future release) Types of data replicated Any file system data Any data, including file systems or raw partition data (Oracle, Sybase, Informix) Any data Granularity of replication Entire file system Entire volume Files, volumes, or directories (supports include and exclude filters) Frequency of data replication Continuous replication – either asynchronous or synchronous Continuous or scheduled replication – asynchronous only Configurations supported One-to-one, one-to-many One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one Ability to update replicated data Yes Yes, through a locally mirrored volume Not during continuous replication, but between scheduled replications Automated rollover to replicated system Can be configured with failover software Yes (optional) Can be configured with failover software Network connections Any IP network (LAN or WAN). A high bandwidth, private network provides the best performance. Any IP network (LAN or A Windows NT network WAN). A high bandwidth, (LAN or WAN). Full private network provides the bandwidth throttling control. best performance. 10 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS Continuous, synchronous replication SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY Bringing High Availability to Disaster Recovery: An Interview with Brooks Graham part 1 of 2 B rooks Graham has worldwide field responsibility as an overall product and technology evangelist, teacher and advisor for VERITAS Cluster Server™ and all of our replication products. He has a wealth of experience and insight gleaned from many different customer environments. He was previously with the VERITAS consulting services organization, where he focused on customer solutions based on VERITAS’ high availability products. Matt Fairbanks, the Product Manager for Replication Products at VERITAS, conducted the interview for VOX. VOX What is your role at VERITAS, and what does your group do? BG – I work in a small, highly technical group. Each member has expertise in and responsibilities for a specific product or product set. We work closely with several other organizations: engineering, product management, sales, support, consulting and product education. Internally, some people unofficially refer to us as the technical evangelists. My focus in the group is online availability solutions including clustering and replication. VOX As a clustering and replication specialist, what kind of new technologies and trends are you seeing in availability solutions? BG – Back in the 90s the focus was on local high availability (HA), using field-tested and proven technologies like VERITAS FirstWatch™ and VERITAS Cluster Server™ (VCS). These local HA solutions continue to remain absolutely essential. But as those approaches matured, we found customers wanting to extend such local HA solutions across multiple sites as a way to create a more highly available disaster recovery solution: taking local clusters and making them wide. Stepping back and looking at the big picture, it became clear that traditional disaster recovery, or DR, as defined in mainframe environments which consists of getting data off site to guard against site-related interruptions and failures, was of utmost concern for critical applications and storage. We very quickly learned that extending local tools to implement site-related data protection strategies was not an option, and new technology would need to be created that would provide a higher level of availability. This approach of separating local HA from site DR allows us to provide optimal solutions to solve the entire range of availability requirements. VOX How, then, do you define disaster recovery? BG – First let’s define high availability, or HA. HA is the ability to survive and immediately recover from local component failures, which would otherwise result in long-term downtime. From an application point of view, DR extends that to protect not only against a local failure, but also to an application or service that cannot be recovered within the data center. The ability to migrate those services to another site so that business operations can resume is what we would call disaster recovery. Of course, DR is a huge topic. We’re focused on providing technology and resources in those areas where VERITAS has proven strengths, such as storage management, application availability and service availability. VOX Is there a type of customer that needs a disaster recovery solution more urgently than others? BG – Certainly DR is not new. Conceptually, we’re not inventing anything. In the mainframe environment, DR solutions have been in use for 30 years or longer. Having said that, the applications and services that are typically protected are those that are deemed to be mission critical or even beyond mission critical. With some of the new economy businesses, the applications are the core of the company’s very existence. Especially with the e-commerce revolution, it’s become generally understood that the application is the business itself. There have been notable and highly publicized outages that have made companies take a serious look at protecting core elements of their business. Even short outages are sometimes frontpage news. Therefore, it’s not surprising to see a large demand for DR and business continuity solutions from all sectors of the economy – from established mature organizations like industrial and financial who come prepared and understand DR, to the pre- and “pre pre-” IPO dot-coms who are tackling these issues for the first time. VOX Do all applications in a customer environment require this level of attention? BG – The answer to that is, of course, usually not. With a small amount of effort, a company can quickly determine the major Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 11 SPECIAL SECTION: REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY applications and services that need to be protected. Other applications on which the core applications do not depend could easily be protected with more traditional backup and recovery methods, such as tape and offsite vaulting. Often overlooked, however, are small applications that the core applications depend upon. Usually those would qualify for the same level of protection as the top tier apps. VOX Now that we understand various availability and DR concepts much better, what specifically would a VERITAS solution look like? BG – Keeping with the VERITAS tradition of using the right solution in the right places, we offer a three step solution. It starts with the local environment. First, we have well established, robust foundation products like VERITAS Volume Manager™ and VERITAS File System that provide availability for storage components, and VERITAS Cluster Server to bring unmatched HA and clustering services to keep applications and servers available locally. The second step is to move the application environment and the data physically to another site. VERITAS Volume Replicator™ provides an efficient, robust method to remotely mirror an application environment to up to 32 remote locations. By producing a complete mirror of the entire environment, VERITAS Volume Replicator delivers the optimal foundation for disaster recovery. The final layer of this DR solution would be VERITAS Global Cluster Manager™ (GCM), which leverages the site-specific VERITAS components like Cluster Server, Volume Manager and File System, and provides global management and seamless application site migration for those mission critical applications. For example, a critical Oracle® database would be made highly 12 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS available with VERITAS Cluster Server while VERITAS Volume Replicator is replicating or mirroring its entire storage environment to a remote location. In the event of a local failure such as a bad CPU, chip, or other component failure, VERITAS Cluster Server would rapidly migrate the application resource group to a failover machine locally. This allows Oracle to continue to operate at the site with minimal or no impact to users. In the event of an entire site failure, VERITAS Global Cluster Manager, understanding that the application is replicated to another site, would seamlessly migrate those services to a secondary site. Keep in mind that site failures can include a wide variety of events, ranging from your data center becoming a “smoking hole on the ground” to regional power or communications outages. Not all site disasters involve some physical catastrophic event, but rather a longterm interruption in communications which could render an application invalid at any given site. A VERITAS disaster recovery strategy protects our customers from a wide range of site failures. VOX This sounds like a powerful solution. What are some of the real world challenges our customers face with deploying something like this? BG – It’s not really all that complicated. Many of our customers are already practicing two thirds of our approach. Let’s look at the replication aspect, for example. VERITAS Volume Replicator is based on well-established VERITAS Volume Manager technology. So, most of our customers already understand how Volume Replicator works. Local clustering is also a well known technology. The last third that is often left out is global management and migration. The challenges of bringing local high availability into a disaster recovery environment typically involve resource allocation and planning. I can’t stress the planning strongly enough. Without it, even the best technologies can be rendered useless at the time when you need them most. In fact, there are many consultant services whose core competency is to help our customers with disaster recovery or business contingency planning. VERITAS is working with several DR service providers to leverage the VERITAS approach for their customer base. These companies understand DR from the data center, to facilities, to the power, to the cafeteria. They can provide a valuable service when planning and preparing a business contingency strategy. VOX What advice would you give to a company looking at reassessing their disaster recovery practices? BG – Usually we see customers evaluating which applications are key, but defining metrics such as downtime and data loss tolerance on an application by application basis is also important. When choosing technology solutions, be sure that the solution can scale and encompass more than just one segment of IT operations. Data replication alone is not enough. A solution that includes an integrated set of technologies, ranging from low-level storage resource management all the way to complete site application management will provide you with the most robust solution. Select appropriate tools and technologies at the right levels within the environment to ensure business continuity. Then I’d suggest that they make it a priority. Many of our customers have a budget for disaster recovery, but they will too often fail to make this a priority until it’s too late. Continued in the next issue. SOLUTIONS VERITAS NetBackup™ Version 3.4 Now Released in DataCenter and BusinesServer™ Editions By Cindy Guiles and Glen Simon, Senior Product Marketing Managers Enterprise Data Protection for the 21st Century VERITAS NetBackup™ is a complete family of solutions designed to meet the needs of both small to mid-size UNIX/heterogeneous environments as well as enterpriseclass customers. Regardless of the size of the data store, type of data or platform, NetBackup offers the price, performance and reliability suited to any environment. NetBackup 3.4 for the first time creates a comprehensive backup product line designed to scale from departmental or workgroup environments all the way to the enterprise. VERITAS NetBackup™ DataCenter provides the most extensive functionality of any data protection product in the industry today, delivering unrivaled performance, manageability and scalability for the largest and most demanding enterprises managing terabytes of data. Ideal for the most demanding datacenters and corporate campuses of the Global 2000, NetBackup DataCenter leverages the latest robotic and SAN storage technologies and a 3-tier management architecture to enable levels of centralized storage management once thought possible only on the mainframe. Unparalleled platform and application coverage allows NetBackup DataCenter to adapt to any environment and protect data stored anywhere in the enterprise. VERITAS NetBackup™ BusinesServer™ is a high performance backup and recovery solution for smaller networks (or departments) that today may have only a small number of UNIX and Windows 2000/NT systems, but may grow in the future. NetBackup BusinesServer is ideal for remote offices or new deployments of heterogeneous LANs in expanding enterprises. ▼ Platform Independence – Protects virtually every popular computing platform, including all major UNIX derivatives, Windows NT/2000, NetWare, Macintosh, Linux, and many others. Host backup devices on UNIX or Windows NT/2000 servers to achieve optimal performance. Expect similar performance and functionality regardless of platform. ▼ Centralized, Policy-Based Administration – Central console provides a single point of administration with an intuitive interface allowing each backup administrator to efficiently manage a much larger number of servers. Automates enterprise backup operations for thousands of users across multiple servers and consolidates management of all your storage devices. ▼ Unparalleled Performance – Multistreams up to 32 different data sources to a single tape drive to realize the maximum rated throughput of your hardware. Overcome file system bottlenecks with FlashBackup to achieve blistering backup and recovery speeds. ▼ Transparent, Nondisruptive Backups – Database-aware agent technology provides secure, reliable protection of mission critical databases without compromising application availability. Highly efficient design results in marginal CPU utilization during backup operations. Integration with hardware-based split-mirror and snapshot technologies or with FlashBackup™ provides complete transparency of backup operations. In VERITAS NetBackup 3.4, both versions have been created from a common code base. The new licensing system allows a smooth and transparent upgrade path from BusinesServer to DataCenter. Comprehensive Corporate Data Protection With NetBackup DataCenter, organizations can manage all aspects of backup and recovery using intuitive graphical user interfaces, thus allowing consistent backup policies to be set across the enterprise. NetBackup DataCenter provides optional database- and application-aware backup and recovery solutions for Oracle®, SAP™ R/3™, Informix, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, DB2, and Lotus® Notes/Domino™. NetBackup DataCenter’s sophisticated media management enables organizations to perform all aspects of media management, including library sharing. In addition, NetBackup’s Java™ interface provides complete realtime and historical analysis of all backup and recovery operations. Key Strengths ▼ Unlimited Scalability – Centralized management and control, high performance technology and flexible four tier architecture enable NetBackup to effortlessly adapt to the growing needs of the modern data center. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 13 SOLUTIONS ▼ Leverage the Latest Storage Hardware – NetBackup DataCenter supports all the latest robotic and tape technologies from leading vendors as well as SCSI and fibre channel interconnects. Dynamically share the resources of a tape library over SCSI or a SAN, or use the NDMP option to locally protect network-attached storage (NAS) systems or large storage appliances. Scalable Four Tier Architecture There are hundreds of products that perform backup and recovery for open systems environments. However, very few were designed to handle the amount of data in the new data center. Once the sole domain of mainframes, the new data centers are built around large UNIX servers and NT/2000 clusters where organizations run their business critical applications. NetBackup has a four tier architecture that, combined with advanced media management and pure speed, can address the largest data center installations. ▼ ▼ ▼ The first tier consists of the NetBackup Master Server. The role of the Master Server is to act as the “brains” for actions such as scheduling and tracking client backups. It can have one or more tape devices/libraries attached for backing up data from multiple clients. If organizations have data in several locations or have data intensive applications such as data warehouses, they can implement Media Servers that locally back up large applications while backing up other clients over the network. A Media Server can share a tape library with the Master Server or another Media Server, or work with its own tape devices. If a Media Server fails, the attached client’s backups can be routed to another Media Server. The third tier is that of the client agents which back up servers and workstations. Normally, this tier represents the largest number of 14 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS individual machines but not necessarily the most data. Both the Media Servers and clients can be centrally managed from the Master Server. ▼ For organizations that require centralized management of multiple NetBackup Master Servers and/or widely distributed environments, VERITAS created a fourth tier with Global Data Manager™ for NetBackup. Global Data Manager offers centralized management and control of all NetBackup storage domains in the enterprise. This allows systems administrators and database administrators to manage all aspects of NetBackup. It also facilitates consistent policy management along with the ability to monitor NetBackup storage domains anywhere in the enterprise. A NetBackup storage domain consists of one NetBackup Master Server and one or more NetBackup Media Servers. In campus situations and where operations may be dispersed in multiple geographic locations, there may be more than one storage domain. One instance of Global Data Manager that controls multiple storage domains is called an enterprise domain. Implementation Flexibility Both the installation and implementation of NetBackup are easy processes. In fact, the Windows NT/2000 server version provides a wizard-driven installation and configuration program. Administrators can define backup schedules with the graphical scheduling interface. The scheduler within NetBackup gives the flexibility to define full and incremental backups. Flexible scheduling options are part of the scheduler, including the ability to not only run backups on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, but also by hour. A backup window can be defined to ensure that backups are not run at other than certain times. Lastly, administrators can give backup classes descriptive, multi-word names for tracking and reporting. Breakthrough Technology NetBackup DataCenter has several backup options that redefine traditional backup and restore. The first option, FlashBackup, allows administrators to perform “snapshot” backups for data allocated on UFS, JFS or VERITAS File System™ in Sun Solaris or HPUX environments. FlashBackup performs consistent, physical pointin-time backup that incurs none of the overhead associated with logical backups. However, administrators can perform logical restores using FlashBackup backups. FlashBackup will soon be available for additional UNIX operating systems and Windows 2000. Another breakthrough concept is offered through the Shared Storage Option™ (SSO). SSO is the industry’s first heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) solution that allows individual tape drives (standalone or in a robotic tape library) to be shared dynamically between multiple VERITAS NetBackup servers. The drives are connected to each host via enabling hardware, such as switches, hubs, or multiplexors. SSO allows enterprises to leverage their peripheral investments more thoroughly through drive sharing, since individual drives need not be tied to a specific server anymore, and through better usage of hardware resources. Disaster Recovery NetBackup has not only the ability to perform full or partial recovery from a primary backup, but can be used to recover applications or complete servers in an offsite scenario. NetBackup can automatically create copies of the primary backups. These secondary tapes can then be sent offsite for storage. In addition, NetBackup “de-multiplexes” tapes so that data is “co-located” on them. The reason for this is that most installations have business critical applications that must come up first, followed by secondary and tertiary applications. The process of performing a selective restore is much faster if the data is co-located. SOLUTIONS Very rarely does an organization choose to restore a complete server at a hot site location. Also, the backup copies that NetBackup creates are TAR compatible. While NetBackup uses its own method for moving data and writing data to tape to ensure reliability, it gives the capability for these tapes to be read by basic UNIX utilities. For fully automated disaster recovery, NetBackup includes an option for complete vault management. This includes everything from ejection of the backup copies to the I/O bin in a tape library to pick/pull reports written in a variety of formats including Arcus and Datasafe. Additionally, tapes are automatically rotated to and from the offsite vault. Ease of Use NetBackup allows for multiple choices for administration: Command line, Motif, and Javabased along with a Windows NT/2000 Explorer-like interface. This way, systems administrators can choose between command line and GUI, and database administrators can administer database backup and recovery from the same interface as the systems administrator. Complete UNIX and Windows NT/2000 Solution NetBackup DataCenter 3.4 is the only solution that delivers equal functionality and performance combined with intuitive graphical user interfaces for both UNIX and Windows NT/2000 environments. Customers can choose UNIX servers, Windows NT/2000 servers or a combination as their backup server platform without sacrificing scalability or ease of use. Ideal Value/Performance Ratio with NetBackup BusinesServer NetBackup BusinesServer is the first backup and recovery solution designed for small to mid-size UNIX/heterogeneous installations that combines performance with an attractive price point. The wizarddriven GUI for NetBackup BusinesServer provides an intuitive interface not normally found in UNIX based solutions. The combination of value, performance and ease of use makes NetBackup BusinesServer the premier data protection solution for small to midsize UNIX/heterogeneous installations and remote office locations. NetBackup BusinesServer offers customers the ability to configure, monitor, and control backup and recovery jobs from an easy to use Java GUI interface. BusinesServer provides client support for virtually all popular computing platforms along with the flexibility to integrate leading relational databases. NetBackup BusinesServer is an ideal data protection solution for UNIX or heterogeneous workgroups. Its intuitive GUI helps to reduce administration costs. It can be centrally managed with VERITAS VERITAS Global Data Manager manages multiple domains. VERITAS Global Data Manager NetBackup DataCenter Storage Domain NetBackup BusinesServer NetBackup DataCenter Storage Domain NetBackup BusinesServer Global Data Manager as part of a consistent global data protection strategy. NetBackup BusinesServer 3.4 continues to allow, as part of the base server package, the ability to back up a maximum of 4 remote clients in addition to the server itself. Additionally, BusinesServer 3.4 adds an optional client expansion pack, which will allow the backup of an additional 4 clients, for a total maximum of 8 remote clients. NetBackup BusinesServer 3.4 supports Lotus Notes as an optional agent. NetBackup BusinesServer 3.4 adds an NDMP agent option to support customers in the networkattached storage market. The VERITAS NetBackup Family The VERITAS NetBackup™ industry leading family of software products is a comprehensive backup and recovery solution set for protecting data anywhere from the desktop to the data center. For the largest and most demanding enterprises, VERITAS NetBackup™ DataCenter combines extensive functionality with scalable architecture to offer unrivaled performance and manageability to protect terabytes of data. VERITAS NetBackup BusinesServer™ delivers the price, performance and ease of use expected by smaller organizations and workgroups, and provides a manageable, cost effective solution for reliably protecting remote sites and field offices. VERITAS NetBackup Professional™ (see article on following page) efficiently protects the intellectual property on users’ desktops and mobile laptops, leveraging a scalable design and sophisticated data reduction techniques to achieve a practical backup solution for potentially thousands of mobile users. Regardless of the location, amount or importance of your data, the NetBackup data protection family provides all the tools you need to ensure uninterrupted data availability for your company to survive and prosper in the competitive business environment of today, tomorrow and the future. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 15 SOLUTIONS VERITAS NetBackup Professional™: Centralizing Backup and Simplifying Recovery for Distributed Client Data By Christophe Bertrand, Senior Product Marketing Manager A personal question, if we may: when is the last time you backed up the data on your laptop? How often do you do these backups? If your laptop were stolen today, would that entail not just a loss of the hardware, but also of much critical business data? If you are like many other professionals, backing up the data on your mobile laptop is not a high priority. As the installed base of laptops and remote desktop computers grows, the chances for theft or data loss due to another reason also increase. Data on desktops and mobile workstations can be enormously valuable to your organization. It can be the result of hours or weeks of work, and replacing it may be impossible. Worse yet, a slow recovery can cost days of lost productivity. Mobile users need easy, fast backups and simplified, rapid recoveries of their critical data, even if recovering to a completely new system. VERITAS NetBackup Professional™ is a comprehensive backup and recovery solution for client systems, designed specifically for the needs of the remote and mobile workstations that drive critical, field-based operations. VERITAS NetBackup Professional gives IT departments a perfect tool to manage and automate distributed backups to a centralized repository in a highly scalable architecture. For users, NetBackup Professional facilitates fast, easy backups and online recovery, from anywhere in the world, over dial-up or network connections. Using NetBackup Professional, organizations 16 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS have a total backup and recovery solution that protects client data anywhere in the enterprise. NetBackup Professional also makes a large contribution to reducing the total cost of investments in technology. VERITAS NetBackup Professional has three main components: ▼ The NetBackup Professional Server accepts connections (NetBackup Professional 3.1) from clients and manages the backup database. NetBackup Professional Server may run on a Windows 2000, Windows NT or UNIX (NetBackup 3.1) server. ▼ The Administration Console allows for centralized management and configuration of multiple servers. Administrators configure and distribute client software centrally and create CD images for “bare metal” restores. ▼ The client software, installed on every client, performs automated backups, and connects with the NetBackup Professional Server for recovery. Efficient Data Protection at Low Overhead, Low Bandwidth NetBackup Professional works so well over low bandwidth situations in part because it writes the smallest possible amount of information to backup. Much of the data residing on distributed workstations is actually identical: the latest version of Microsoft Office™, for example, or a recent memo from the president. NetBackup Professional maintains a database of common or shared files. Instead of backing up 1000 copies of an application or document, it writes it just once to the database and makes a “logical” backup of the rest, pointing to the shared copy. By WAN Administration (Web Console) Internet Explorer 4 Netscape Navigator 6 Administration (Windows Console) Windows 2000 Windows NT 4 LAN Windows 95/ 98 Windows NT/2000 Solaris* Servers Clients *In Version 3.1 Remote Clients Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4 Workstation Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4 Workstation Windows 95/ 98 SOLUTIONS backing up only the unique files on each system, NetBackup Professional significantly reduces backup times and volumes. The initial full backup of a system is typically managed by a transfer of less than 10% of the total size of the protected file system. Even open files are protected by NetBackup Professional. An additional benefit is the reduced time it takes to recover a NetBackup Professional server, should it fail, as there is far less data that needs to be restored. On subsequent backups, NetBackup Professional applies an incremental backup to write only changed data. This further reduces the time and volume of the backup. The client software optionally encrypts and compresses all backups before sending them to the NetBackup Professional Server. The server combines the changes, so the latest version of the file is complete and data integrity is ensured. It also stores a reverse delta version of files to still allow access to earlier versions. VERITAS NetBackup Professional accounts for the data protection and availability needs of the diverse communities of IT departments, end users and enterprise management. Simplified Backup and Fast Recovery for End Users It was very important to VERITAS developers to give the end users all the tools needed to back up and restore data independently. NetBackup Professional lets users schedule automatic backups when they are connected to the network. Users connecting only intermittently or through dial-up lines can perform manual backups quickly and easily. By integrating with Microsoft Explorer, we have reduced the learning curve for end users and have made file selection in the restore process very easy. In addition, data integrity in Windows 2000 environments is assured through the backup of alternate data streams as well as primary data streams. To support a “bare metal” restore, the administrator creates a set of bootable diskettes and CD-ROMs for each system. Administrators can furnish these resources in advance or supply them on demand when an emergency happens, thus giving the user the capability to perform a complete system restore, even from a new system. Taken together, the CD and disk, once required, give the user the capability to perform a complete system recovery, even from a new system. The total recovery is fast and simple, and easily managed by the end user without MIS support. Daily System Snapshots The NetBackup Professional client software connects to the NetBackup Professional Server to create an online “snapshot” of the current system. This records the system’s information as of the current date, writing new unique files and changed data to the repository. Having a consistent snapshot lets users recover individual files or the entire system to a specific day’s state. Fast, Restartable Backups Because NetBackup Professional only writes changed data on backup and compresses all transmissions, the backup is very fast and efficient to perform. If the backup is interrupted, which is usually caused by unstable communication links, it resumes where it left off once the connection is restored. Self-Service Recovery If users need to restore one or more files, they can do so from anywhere, over phone lines or networked connections. They can do so at any NetBackup Professional Server ◆ Single Instance Store ◆ “Bare Metal” Restore from CD-ROM ◆ Supports 10,000 users Supported Operating Environments: ◆ Windows 2000 Server ◆ Windows 2000 Advanced Server ◆ Windows NT 4 Server ◆ Solaris 2.7 and 2.8* Windows 2000 Professional *In Version 3.1 Windows NT 4 Workstation Remote Clients WAN / LAN ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ Workgroup or Enterprise Transmit only changed blocks User driven recovery Single file or complete restore Encrypted and compressed data Dial-up connection NetBackup Professional Clients Internet connection Windows 95 Windows 98 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 17 SOLUTIONS time of the day or night, without the assistance of IT staff. The selfdirected, 7x 24-recovery model fits users’ rising expectations for continuous service. File Exclusion Even though the backup is inherently secure, with encrypted transmission and a secured repository users can also choose to exclude specific files from backups, either for security reasons or to prevent backups of temporary data. A Highly Manageable Data Protection Solution for IT VERITAS NetBackup Professional lets IT departments protect distributed data without burdening individual users with difficult backup tasks or draining IT resources. Scalability and Low Bandwidth NetBackup Professional is doubtlessly the most scalable solution on the market for remote client backups. Our testing facility has shown that NetBackup Professional with its new proprietary database can support more than 10,000 clients. NetBackup Professional’s single instance storage, in which common files on each system are only stored once, typically reduces disk storage requirements for the data repository by over 90% when there are more than 1,000 users on a server. The client calculates the backup set and compresses the data, freeing server resources to manage more concurrent backups. A “throttle” feature lets IT staff limit the number of concurrent backups to maximize network efficiency. Support for multiple NIC cards and additional processors enables the solution to scale as organizations grow. Centralized Management An easy to use Windows NT-based graphical interface or web-based console facilitates centralized backup management, from distributing client software to creating recovery CDs, to centralized reporting. From a single machine on the network, you may 18 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS deploy the client software to the Windows 95,98, NT or 2000 clients that need it. Client profiles allow the administrator to group users into logical categories, protect specific types of data, and assign specific schedules and priorities. Any number of users can be grouped or assigned to a profile to simplify configuration and deployment. Profiling establishes client protection policies that deliver uniform and automated protection without additional administrator or user action. Administrators have profile-level control over user rights regarding user-initiated backups and restores and the ability to exclude certain files or file types from the backup process. Easy to use wizards provide step-by-step instructions for administrators. The management console gives a centralized view of multiple servers, management of client profiles, and the status of operations for each NetBackup Professional Server or backup data repository, including load balancing and scheduling of the backup window. The console gives administrators control over all client machines and NT repositories. It also serves as the monitor and reporting station for the statistics on the amount and type of user data being protected on each client, client group or entire installation. A Proactive Data Protection Tool for Business Continuance Armed with effective tools for monitoring and reporting the protection status of the enterprise, business and IT professionals can make timely decisions about protection-related parameters like storage capacity requirements, backup scheduling, user or group profiles, protection status of individual or group and much more. Trending features provide a visual gauge for administrators to view the rate at which their server repository is growing so they may proactively monitor and plan their storage requirements. Integration with the most popular report generator, Seagate Crystal Reports, simplifies the analysis and reporting of client data on the server. NetBackup Professional integrates well into almost any information architecture. NetBackup Professional clients can be easily deployed across a variety of desktop and notebook systems. NetBackup Professional supports Windows 2000, NT and UNIX (version 3.1) servers and industry-standard hardware platforms, so it can integrate easily into an existing IT infrastructure. Compared with alternatives that manage backups manually or rely mainly on tape devices, VERITAS NetBackup Professional is the most cost-effective solution available. This is both because of its tremendous scalability and the fact that NetBackup Professional is a disk-todisk backup strategy. Since it supports more clients with a smaller repository, NetBackup Professional is both easier and less expensive to implement than alternatives. It’s never too late to change. Wouldn’t it be nice if the loss of your laptop would not be more than a temporary inconvenience? Really, this is one situation where standing out from the crowd is a very good thing. SOLUTIONS and Sign Agreement to Deliver Storage Management Solutions for AIX/Monterey ERITAS recently announced a business agreement with IBM in support of the AIX/Monterey operating system. As part of the agreement, VERITAS Software will be porting and optimizing its complete set of storage management solutions, including VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS File System, to AIX/Monterey for IBM POWER and Intel IA-64 processor-based systems. V “The availability of VERITAS Software solutions for AIX/Monterey will offer our customers choices in storage management to help them maintain the availability of critical data,” said Ross Mauri, vice president, UNIX Software, Enterprise Systems Group, IBM Corporation. “The addition of these solutions will enhance the set of AIX/Monterey offerings as the industry’s premier UNIX platform.” This agreement tightly links VERITAS products to the IBM AIX operating system, and provides IBM users integrated, end-to-end storage management with improved performance, manageability and availability. AIX/Monterey is a significant operating system in the enterprise computing market, and customers will be able to benefit from VERITAS data availability and protection solutions in their heterogeneous computing environments. It is expected that VERITAS technology will be able to enhance the performance and reliability of IBM AIX/Monterey environments. Due to the availability of VERITAS products for them, IBM customer will also have additional choices and opportunities that allow them to further customize data centers and computing environments according to business needs. This also applies to the third party market of providers of tape devices and intelligent disk arrays, of which customers will be able to choose from a broader spectrum. Later this year, IBM and VERITAS will broadcast the timetable for customer availability of the VERITAS solutions newly ported to AIX/Monterey. Version 8.5 of VERITAS Backup Exec™ for NetWare New Competitive Migration Suite ARCServeIT 6.x Tape Read Capability ! By Lucia Trejos, Product Marketing Manager and John Freeman, Product Manager V ERITAS is proud to announce a new release of VERITAS Backup Exec for NetWare version 8.5 - now with ARCserveIT 6.x tape read capability. Customers looking to migrate from a competitor’s product to Backup Exec for NetWare can now do so easily without needing to initially convert all tapes; they can now simply read legacy ARCserveIT tapes as necessary. Backup Exec for NetWare gives ARCserveIT customers the ability to import or restore ARCserveIT 4, 5, and 6.x tape-based data and eliminates the need for separate servers just for maintaining ARCserveIT restore capability. VERITAS is committed to helping customers migrate easily from a competitor’s product to VERITAS Backup Exec with ARCserveIT 6.x tape read capability. Now through August 31, 2000, we have combined all the features of Backup Exec for NetWare with our most sought after options to create one neat package priced 40% below MSRP. The new Backup Exec for NetWare Competitive Migration Suite includes: VERITAS Backup Exec for NetWare Competitive Upgrade (Single or Multi-server Edition) with ARCserve 4, 5 and 6.x tape read capability for easy migration ▼ Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option automates and cuts in half the number of steps required to recreate a NetWare server ▼ Backup Exec Open File Option protects every file on your network, including files in use ▼ One or two full years of maintenance and 12 x 5 tech support (available with VIP combo packs only) To request your free evaluation copy of VERITAS Backup Exec for NetWare version 8.5, contact your reseller or distributor, call us at ▼ 1-800-327-2232 or surf over to our website at www.veritas.com/us/products/benw/. If you decide to purchase the Competitive Migration Suite, be sure to do it before August 31, 2000, to benefit from the 40% discount that is available only until then. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 19 SAN e-commerce Continuous Access Clustering VERITAS® VISION2000™ 4th Annual VERITAS Worldwide User’s Conference October 22-26, 2000 • Bellagio Hotel & Resort • Las Vegas, NV V ERITAS® VISION2000™, the Fourth Annual VERITAS Worldwide User’s Conference, is the premier event to gain product knowledge, mingle with VERITAS executives and network with other VERITAS software users. Come and share your experiences, discuss proven strategies and explore the furthest reaches of the storage management universe. You can preview the latest VERITAS solutions and participate in the product updates and strategy discussions. Choose from over 70 sessions: technical presentations, business sessions, product demonstrations, complimentary product tutorials, forums on current issues in storage management, data availability, SANs, and much more. You’ll return to your office with a wealth of knowledge that will enable you to work smarter, faster, and better. Whether you are a VERITAS user, an IT Manager, or you just want valuable insight into keeping critical business data available, VISION2000 is for you. Sunday, October 22 • Registration • Complimentary Product Tutorials • Welcome Reception Monday, October 23 • Executive Keynote Address • Storage Industry Panel • Solutions Pavilion • Birds of a Feather Sessions • Dinner and Entertainment by Dana Carvey, Emmy award winning comedian and star of Wayne’s World and Saturday Night Live. Tuesday, October 24 • SAN Industry Panel • Breakout Presentations • Solutions Pavilion • Ask the Experts Reception 20 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS • Birds of a Feather Sessions • VERITAS Partner-Sponsored Receptions Wednesday, October 25 • Special Motivational Presentation by Dr. Beck Weathers, survivor of the deadliest Mt. Everest climbing expedition in history. • Breakout Presentations • Solutions Pavilion • Birds of a Feather Sessions • Dinner and special performance by Penn & Teller, recently named two of the funniest people alive in Entertainment Weekly. Penn & Teller will bring their offbeat brand of magic and comedy to VISION2000. Thursday, October 26 • Breakout Presentations until noon • Conference Raffle and Wrap-up WHO SHOULD ATTEND This event is loaded with valuable information for anyone involved with planning, managing or ensuring the availability of business critical data, including: • All VERITAS Users— New and Experienced • Storage Administrators • IT Management • Network Administrators • Systems Administrators and Analysts • Database Administrators • Storage and Data Availability Industry Partners Manageability High Availability Storage Management Data Protection Business Without Interruption “At the VERITAS® User’s Conference I can learn firsthand the strategies and directions for VERITAS products and solutions. I also have the chance to network with people who are using VERITAS products in today’s leading edge environments such as SAN and e-business, and learn more from their success stories.” - Peter Gregory, Manager of IT Engineering, AT&T Wireless Complimentary Tutorials Data Protection Track Attendees are invited to attend product tutorials taking place on Sunday, October 22 from 9:00am to 5:00pm. • Advanced VERITAS Volume Manager™ • Advanced VERITAS Cluster Server™ • Advanced VERITAS NetBackup™ • VERITAS Backup Exec™ • Storage Area Networks (SAN) • High Availability • Oracle® Solutions • Disaster Recovery • NetBackup Professional • NetBackup-Enterprise/BusinesServer • Backup Exec • Global Data Manager High Availability Track Conference Registration Executive Keynote Addresses • VERITAS Cluster Server™ • VERITAS ClusterX™ • Replication • Storage Replicator for Volume Manager Advance Registration $895 (until October 20) Onsite Registration $995 Top executives, including President and CEO Mark Leslie and EVP of Engineering Fred van den Bosch present their vision and strategies for data availability in today’s e-business environment. Storage Industry Panel Executives from key VERITAS® Partners in the storage industry, such as Compaq, Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems will answer your questions regarding current and future storage industry issues. SAN Industry Panel Executives from leading SAN vendors such as ATL Products, BROCADE Communication Systems, Inc., Gadzoox Systems, Hitachi, McDATA Corp., PricewaterhouseCoopers, and StorageTek will come together to answer your questions and address SAN issues. Breakout Presentations Hear intensive real-world experiences by VERITAS end users, employees and partners. With over 70 presentations to choose from, topics will span all products, technical levels and business management issues. Learn how customers have deployed VERITAS products and the bottom line benefits they have achieved. Presentations by VERITAS engineers and product management will highlight the latest storage management and data availability technology solution breakthroughs. You can pick the presentations tailored to your needs! Foundations/Editions Track • Database Editions for Oracle and Sybase • Volume Management • File System Management SAN Track • ROI-Return on Investment • Shared Storage Option • New SAN Management Products • User Implementations and Best Practices Business Track • Total Cost of Ownership for Distributed Computing • SAN Cost Justification and Bottom Line Benefits • Business Impact Analysis 3 Easy ways to register! Online: www.veritasvision.com Phone: 1(888)421-4382 or 1(925)287-5348 (outside the U.S). Fax: Use the registration form on the website and send to 1(925)287-5300 All fees (US Dollars) include entry to all conference events, sessions, tutorials, Solutions Pavilion, evening activities, and meals. Discount Air Fares United Airlines is the official conference airline of Vision2000. Attendees can receive a discounted air fare by calling United at 1-800-521-4041 and referencing meeting id code: 598QG. VERITAS Partners will present their storage management vision, strategies, and complementary product solutions United will provide round-trip transportation on United, United Express or Shuttle by United service in the U.S. and Canada at fares of either 5% discount off any published fares, including first class, in effect when tickets are purchased subject to all applicable restrictions, or a 10% discount off applicable BUA, or like, fares in effect when tickets are purchased 10 days in advance. United will also give an additional 5% towards tickets purchased at least 60 days in advance of travel. Birds of a Feather Sessions Discount Hotel Rates Partner Track Meet colleagues each evening to discuss subjects of common interest. A VERITAS engineer will be available at each session to help answer technical questions. Submit your suggestion for a topic at the conference website: www.veritasvision.com Ask the Experts Reception Ask questions, discuss environments and seek advice. Come join VERITAS engineers and product managers in the Solutions Pavilion on Tuesday, October 24 from 5:00 to 7:00pm. For more information, go to The Bellagio Hotel & Resort 3600 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV 89177 www.BellagioLasVegas.com To make a reservation call 1-888-987-6667, or 1-702-693-7111 if dialing from outside the United States. To get the special rate of $199 per night at the Bellagio, please mention VERITAS VISION and make reservations by September 22, 2000. The hotel is expected to sell out. Please book in advance. www.veritasvision.com Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 21 SOLUTIONS The VERITAS, Oracle and Sun Initiative Three Companies – One Integrated Solution Sound Familiar? An emerging dot-com business is unavailable for five hours while technicians troubleshoot a problem. Eroding customer confidence threatens the company’s growth plans. A successful promotion slows a major e-commerce site to a crawl. Capacity needs to double, but there is no easy way to scale the current system. A global manufacturing company proudly introduces online purchasing. Behind the scenes, the IT staff scrambles to support an infrastructure unprepared for 24x7 availability. Three technology leaders, VERITAS, Oracle and Sun, have created the VERITAS, Oracle and Sun Initiative (VOS), to help businesses address these issues. VOS brings together the essentials of an ebusiness infrastructure including storage management software, database software technology, and server systems. Previously, the many companies that used these products were also responsible for integrating them. Now, VERITAS, Oracle and Sun, building upon their long history of partnership, have taken the next step: jointly integrated products and services. In doing so, these three ebusiness leaders have raised the bar for rapid deployment, high availability, reduced complexity, and swift problem resolution. This landmark initiative integrates the leading storage management and database with Sun servers for comprehensive high availability solutions. This is what the VOS Initiative will bring customers: Common, Validated Configurations Joint validation provides tightly integrated products that have undergone interoperability testing for Initiative 22 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS streamlined deployment. Configurations include VERITAS storage management software, the stability and transactional framework of an Oracle database management system, and leading enterprise hardware and software from Sun. Ongoing product development plans ensure that these configurations will continue to work together as your e-business grows. Initial base configurations consist of VERITAS storage management software, Oracle database software and Sun servers. VERITAS, Oracle and Sun will continue to work together to provide interoperabilitytested configurations that meet your business needs. Jointly Staffed Escalation Center The VOS Joint Escalation Center (JEC) resolves interoperability issues. Located in a single facility in Pleasanton, CA, the JEC is staffed with senior support engineers from each of the three companies, with single management accountability. The 7x24 operation employs common processes for integrated resolution and ensures rapid problem resolution. The JEC provides customers of all three companies a single source of expertise, coordinated support, and a level of problem resolution previously unavailable in the industry. Unified, Professional Consulting Unified consulting services combine the experience of three leading IT consulting organizations, providing high availability assessment, solution design, and implementation. These services assess the “people, products and processes” of the client’s production data center and recommend the specific actions for achieving the client’s goals. SOLUTIONS Unified consulting services include: ▼ Availability Assessment Service – gap analysis report pinpointing areas for availability improvement ▼ Design and Implementation Service – deployment plans and implementation ▼ Advanced customer training and education – VOS deployment courses This initiative is unique to the industry because the three leading technology companies have combined both products and services to deliver an integrated solution, previously available only with the limitations of a single vendor. For maximum benefit to customers, support and consulting personnel from these three companies will be able to deliver services jointly. The validated configurations combine hardware, software and services to create a thoroughly tested database configuration. With the combined technical expertise and superior products, customers can maximize system availability and respond rapidly to business growth. A recent Dataquest Alert from Gartner Group had some interesting comments about business conditions and the VOS Initiative. Discussing VOS, Dataquest noted that "The product creation factors associated with producing a complex integrated product and developing the best of breed solution rarely come together in one company." They also said that "Dataquest believes this form of collaborative product creation process is the answer to the strict requirements of e-business.” While VOS will initially focus on North American customers, there are plans to roll out the Initiative to other parts of the world. For more information, please visit the VOS website at www.vosinitiative.com. On the website, you can see what solution configurations are currently validated and available from the Initiative, and register for additional information or to be considered for the new Customer Advisory Council. The VOS Initiative is a key component of the Oracle E-Business Continuity program designed to help customers meet the availability challenges posed by e-business. For additional VOS news and the latest updates on our Oracle solutions, please go to our newly updated Oracle website at www.veritas.com/oracle, which also has event information and dates. See VERITAS at Oracle OpenWorld 2000 VERITAS Software is a gold sponsor of Oracle OpenWorld 2000. This event will take place in San Francisco, CA, October 1-5, 2000. Visit the VERITAS booth (#1326), and attend a session on VERITAS solutions or the VOS Initiative. More information about Oracle OpenWorld can be found at www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html. New Customer Case Study: Oracle Business OnLine Oracle Business OnLine is a fast growing applications service provider (ASP) that offers a wide range of e-business solutions to companies of all sizes. They were in need of a powerful data storage management solution to handle the growth in their data and customer base. Oracle Business OnLine decided on VERITAS NetBackup™ for Oracle and VERITAS Database Edition™ for Oracle®. “As an industry standard, VERITAS Software is an essential part of any technology stack. It is easy to install and easy to administer and integrates almost seamlessly with other industry-leading technology.” Matt Yearling Vice President Oracle Hosting Services Read the full story online at www.veritas.com/oracle along with our other news. “VERITAS Software offers a robust, industry-standard storage management product that is the least complex and most scalable of solutions in the marketplace. It is very assuring to have the level of reliability that VERITAS Software delivers.” Tim Chou President Oracle Business OnLine Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 23 SOLUTIONS VERITAS Remote Storage™ for Microsoft® Exchange: Optimal Space Management of Exchange Databases By Cindy Guiles, Senior Product Marketing Manager B usinesses face increasing challenges when they need to protect e-mail and the documents and attachments that are forwarded with those messages, along with the increasing numbers of vital communications being sent. Email exchanges occur everywhere and all the time, and are often the only reflection of an important transaction or commitment. Microsoft Exchange is experiencing a transformation into a repository for files and critical data, but was really not designed as such. Data managers need to manage storage space for messages and attachments, and protect the data therein just like other high priority data that must be available at all times. Unfortunately, the majority of space taken up by Exchange Information Stores is taken up by message attachments. Every time a full backup or recovery of an Exchange system takes place, these attachments are being backed up over and over again. VERITAS Remote Storage™ for Microsoft Exchange (RSE) helps to manage storage space and safeguard data integrity at the same time. VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange allows organizations to move older message attachments in Exchange databases to a secondary storage device, such as a tape drive or library, that users might already be using to back up their system. With VERITAS RSE, the size of Exchange databases may shrink by more than 50 percent, while Exchange clients retain complete access to all of the message attachments that have been moved by VERITAS RSE. With a minimal amount of data stored in the Exchange Information Store, customers can expect faster backups and recoveries of their Exchange environment, as well as a better performing Exchange Server. VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange gives administrators the ability to create policies that determine how and which attachments are to be managed per Exchange server. Selection criteria can be based on size and age of the attachments. Even though the attachments have been moved out of Exchange, Remote Storage allows users to retrieve any of these attachments whenever they need them, just by opening them within their Outlook clients. RSE is so closely tied to RSE Server Locally attached storage device RSE Database Server RSE Media Server VERITAS Backup Exec for Windows NT/2000 v8.x RSE Agent Exchange 5.5, Service Pack 3 MS Outlook 97, 98, or 2000 RSE Mail Client Extension 24 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS SOLUTIONS Exchange and Outlook that it is transparent to the users that an attachment has been moved out of Exchange. A pop-up notifier appears when they attempt to open an attachment that has been moved, so that users don’t have to interpret an hourglass. VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange is based on Remote Storage Server, technology that VERITAS Software developed with Microsoft Corporation for Microsoft Windows 2000. Remote Storage Server provides automated file migration to tape media. VERITAS Data Analyzer for Exchange In addition, VERITAS has created VERITAS Data Analyzer™ for Exchange, a tool that interrogates the user’s Exchange databases and evaluates what percentage of the database consists of attachments versus message text, as well as the age and size of the attachments that are in the databases. VERITAS Data Analyzer for Exchange is the only tool of its kind in existence today. Most similar tools on the market today give limited feedback regarding message traffic and user statistics. The Data Analyzer supports a comprehensive analysis of the storage makeup of Exchange data. It helps administrators manage more effectively with statistics about the data being managed by VERITAS RSE, illustrating the amount of space being freed up by VERITAS RSE. A “what if” modeling capability lets administrators see what their databases would look like if they implement different policies, before they commit to them. Integration with Other VERITAS Solutions Deployed together with VERITAS Backup Exec™ for Windows NT/2000 and VERITAS Backup Exec Network Storage Executive™, VERITAS RSE allows management of backups and message attachments from a central location, simplifying the administration and integration of all storage management components of Exchange. Network Storage Executive and VERITAS RSE are both based on the Microsoft Management Console, sharing a common user interface. Remote Storage for Exchange and Backup Exec Network Storage Executive share a common installation of Microsoft SQL, within which they have separate databases. In addition, VERITAS RSE fits into an organization’s existing environment, allowing customers to share a tape library between backup and VERITAS RSE data, adding additional value to the customer’s existing hardware investments. RSE also allows organizations to be more easily compliant with their e-mail retention policies by moving the majority of data into secondary storage. RSE uses the same media manager, ADAMM, that Backup Exec uses. This means that if IT departments have already purchased a device that they use in a data protection strategy today with Backup Exec, RSE will also work with that device, allowing the partitioning of the device to have some of the drives and slots used for Exchange data while the rest is reserved for backup purposes. This also dispenses with the need for different hardware devices for different applications in different areas of a network. “VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange offers corporate customers complete control of the amount of data stored within their organization’s Exchange databases and holds compelling customer value while setting a new standard for Exchange storage management. By integrating VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange with its leading backup products, VERITAS Software provides a superior level of application storage mangement for Exchange, with integrated protection.” Reduced Costs, Less Downtime, Full Message Retention When Remote Storage moves message attachments out of Exchange and to a secondary storage device, in place of the bulky files, it leaves behind tokens in the Exchange databases that point to the data in storage. This attachment movement results in smaller databases containing the same amount of data. Exchange servers perform more efficiently than before the attachment migration. Backup times are shorter, and there is a significant decrease in the time required to bring the Exchange system back online in the event of a disaster. The tokens are automatically recovered along with the databases. RSE helps consolidate Exchange servers by allowing more virtual data to reside in the Exchange Information Store, and reduces the costs incurred by continuous additional server purchases for Exchange. Customers who have already installed VERITAS Backup Exec for Windows NT/2000 can acquire VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange in addition. VERITAS is also publishing a special edition, the VERITAS Storage Suite for Exchange, which bundles VERITAS Backup Exec for Windows NT/2000, VERITAS Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft Exchange and VERITAS Remote Storage for Microsoft Exchange. VERITAS NetBackup™ support for RSE will soon be available as well. Dan Tanner Senior Analyst, Storage and Storage Management Aberdeen Group Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 25 SOLUTIONS and Partner on Zero Downtime Backup Solution Robust, Centralized Storage Management for Heterogeneous Environments By Carol Aizawa, Product Marketing Manager – HP V ERITAS Software is The Data Availability Company, and the world’s leading provider of software solutions that help businesses to benefit from uninterrupted availability, consistent protection and increased manageability of their business critical data. VERITAS NetBackup™ is the industry leading backup and recovery solution that is used by global enterprises in all industries. NetBackup is highly customizable with a large array of options and agents that allow it to become an integral part of customers’ computing operations, scaling along as the business grows and changes. Now, as a result of the strong partnership between VERITAS and Hewlett Packard, VERITAS NetBackup is capable of bringing enhanced benefits to customer businesses. Hewlett Packard and VERITAS have created a joint data protection solution to bring Zero Downtime Backup (ZDB) support to heterogeneous environments. This Zero Downtime Backup solution provides automated, nondisruptive point-in-time backup for business critical applications and databases, ensuring that application processing continues uninterrupted and without performance degradation while backup is underway. VERITAS NetBackup is integrated with the HP SureStore E XP256 disk array, accompanied by consulting services and support, to deliver a consistent 26 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS backup solution across HP-UX, Sun Solaris and Windows NT environments. NetBackup was chosen over competing products due to its wide acceptance in the user community, its reliability and its ability to support heterogeneous environments. Hewlett Packard built its Zero Downtime Backup solution based on the concept of a remote split mirror backup implementation. Briefly, it works like this. The production environment is duplicated and the data sent to a remote site up to 46 km away. At the local or remote site, the duplicated production environment is separated from the backup and recovery environment. Adding to the benefits of a zero impact backup of the application, the duplicated production environment protects critical data from any disaster. This means that HP/VERITAS customers will be able to back up or restore their application, raw data or file system without jeopardizing data integrity or performance. Key benefits of this ZDB solution are: ▼ Reliable, high performance online backup and restore – This high availability solution consistently delivers complete system operability, the highest levels of system performance and nonstop business continuity. ▼ Intuitive GUI – One single administrative console allows for centralized system management from anywhere, anytime. ▼ Full support for heterogeneous environments, including Microsoft Windows NT®, all variations of UNIX®, and Solaris – Lowers the total cost of systems ownership for globally distributed heterogeneous environments. ▼ Tested and tuned to ensure highest system performance – Guarantees high data availability and protection at all times. ▼ Automated, nondisruptive backup – There is zero impact on application performance due to backup operations, and zero downtime of business critical data in Oracle or Exchange databases, raw disks and file systems. ▼ Minimizes downtime for Oracle databases, raw disk and file systems – You benefit from fast recoverability in case of data loss or corruption. ▼ Low overhead – The ZDB backup solution does not require any application host CPU cycles. A key component of the zero impact backup solution is the HP SureStore E data management software, Business Copy XP. The Business Copy utility is a software option for the XP 256 disk array that produces a third mirror break-off to enable a backup without any degradation in the production environment. Business Copy XP enables the user to set up and maintain local (primary site) duplicate copies of open systems data stored on the HP SureStore E disk array XP 256. The point-intime copies, also known as business copies, are generated online without taking the application or database down. A zero impact backup includes these five steps: 1. The database is put into backup mode. This guarantees a consistent version of the data in the business copy. SOLUTIONS 2. VERITAS NetBackup initiates a split of the ongoing mirroring of data between the primary and the target site. 3. After a successful split, the database can be put out of backup mode again. While the database is in backup mode, the application can still access the data and does not have to stop, but performance is slightly decreased. Usually, the database is in backup mode for only 5-10 minutes. 4. Now the VERITAS NetBackup server can perform the backup from the business copy. This process is entirely independent from the application host. 5. When the backup is finished, the mirror can be resumed and the business copy of the data is resynchronized with the original data. The Zero Downtime Backup solution, including services and support, is available now to HP/VERITAS customers worldwide. The Windows NT solution will become available in the third quarter 2000. Integrated Support to Maximize Availability Benefits To support the technology, HP and VERITAS have already completed training of a group of HP technical consultants on VERITAS products. These consultants will represent the combined HP and VERITAS solution to HP customers. In support of the Zero Downtime Backup Initiative, VERITAS and Hewlett Packard have signed a Memorandum of Understanding regarding full cooperative support for all VERITAS products running in an HP customer environment. The cooperative agreement covers a joint warmtransfer call process and a joint escalation management process. The main purpose of the agreement is to minimize overall problem resolution time, thereby significantly increasing overall customer satisfaction of the combined HP/VERITAS solution. “HP is pleased to be working with VERITAS Software to provide customers with a solution that offers stress-free storage backup and recovery of Oracle databases and Microsoft Exchange storage across multiple operating platforms. To help customers lower the total cost of ownership of a heterogeneous Zero-Downtime Backup solution, HP is collaborating with VERITAS Software to make storage management support services that include support of the SAN, servers, storage and software, available on a worldwide basis.” There is no question about the benefits of data protection. Up to now, the problem has been that adequate data protection (i.e., backup, recovery, offsite vaulting) has required key production resources to be involved in the process. With the combination of VERITAS NetBackup and HP technology, customers can fully enjoy all the benefits of fully reliable and consistent backups without the liabilities of production system resource overhead or downtime to databases and applications. David Scott General Manager, Extended Platform Storage Organization Hewlett Packard End user customers must have current support contracts in place with both HP and VERITAS in order to participate in this program. Customers may purchase VERITAS support contracts through the HP Complimentary Products Division or through VERITAS directly. VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services (ECS) also play a significant role in the delivery and support of this integrated solution. To ensure success of ZDB, ECS has coded the first stage of VERITAS NetBackup support for Business Copy together with VERITAS Engineering. The first integration between NetBackup and Business Copy is a set of scripts that invoke the command set needed to achieve Zero Downtime Backup. These commands include calls to NetBackup, Business Copy and associated databases. In addition to the coding effort, ECS also offers a set of onsite consulting services designed to get ZDB customers up and running as quickly as possible. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 27 SAN SOLUTIONS The Eight Features of Highly Successful SAN Data Storage Management: VERITAS SANPoint™ Storage Appliance By Bruce Naegel, Senior Product Manager, Appliance/Linux Division T he dynamic open systems environment presents a real challenge in data storage capacity management. Capacity increases of 100% per year are the average across a range of environments; some of our customers even experience 200% growth in storage capacity per year. While this increase in storage demand occurs across a range of business applications, it is clearly driven by the shift to e-business. Part of the ebusiness challenge to data storage management is the fact that the needs for where capacity is located, including applications and servers, may change quickly and frequently. A business may need capacity for a specific project during a short period of time. Once the project is completed, this storage resource is available for other uses in the organization. If one, for instance, attaches individual storage units to each server, one does not have the flexibility to migrate storage from one application server to another easily. This and other factors in storage management overhead and actual costs were highlighted in a very forward-looking IDC survey done in 1997. In this survey, the actual storage that could be managed by one person was determined in a number of computing environments in Fortune 100 companies. The fully distributed environment, with storage attached directly to servers and servers geographically distributed, was found to require seven times more administrator support per GB than in the fully centralized arrangement, where a central storage server was connected to servers in the same room. 28 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS Considering the difficulties of managing storage, a number of strategies have been used to improve conditions. A popular approach still is to continue using individually connected storage systems, but assign more storage per server ahead of time. This usually means deploying two times to four times the storage required for the application and hope that it will be sufficient to handle application needs. storage pool, but has the flexibility to allow data managers to quickly assign and reassign storage to specific servers. It should be built on open systems hardware and permit redeployment of existing storage into this new highly flexible storage environment. Of course, this may run against business objectives. IT managers need to manage their budgets wisely. It is hard to justify the purchase of more storage for a growing application, if there is existing storage already allocated to another application that may not be fully used. One: Connect Multiple Servers This storage server should make it easy to connect multiple servers to it. In today’s terms, this means a SAN or storage area network, and entails What characteristics should a storage server have to be able to satisfy these needs? Another frequently used strategy is to assign storage centrally, using a central storage server. This can be beneficial, but many readily available storage servers do not have the needed flexibility. Many of them require special attention from systems engineers to do something as basic as changing configurations. The ideal solution would be one that allows for a centralized Storage clients (application servers), SAN infrastructure, and SAN storage pools SAN SOLUTIONS support for a number of SAN environments including arbitrated loop and fabric, configured with hubs and switches. Two: Present Storage as Local The storage server should present the storage to each of the storage clients as if it were local storage. For many applications, it will be required to have the storage to look like SCSI disk drives. There are certain applications where presenting the information as files is also important. Three: Easy Storage Assignment It should be easy and quick to assign storage to a storage client from the console. The work should be done via a GUI which has the look and feel used commonly preferred by the enterprise. Four: Grow Storage Online It would be desirable for data availability in certain operating system environments to be able to actually grow storage online. For example, Microsoft Windows NT can be configured for this type of use. Five: Manage Multiple Instances from Single GUI One should be able to manage multiple instances of these storage servers from a single GUI. This means a network connection to the storage servers, so administrative security is required. Multiple levels of storage security would be helpful, especially if one level were to be read-only and the top level would be the one to assign permissions. Six: Configuration Options The storage should be configurable for multiple levels of resiliency, capacity and performance, so a data manager can choose the right level of storage service for the specific application requirement. There should be many ways to configure storage for supported applications, including multiple pathways from a disk entity to the hosts. Seven: Bind a Single Storage Element to a Specific Host Seventh, for the Microsoft Windows NT environment, because of the way Windows NT assigns storage, there needs to be the capability to bind a single storage element to a specific host. For security reason, this is also useful in other operating system environments, but is required for Windows NT. It would be highly desirable to have this specific central assignment be one that runs on the storage server itself. The feature would then be enabled across operating systems. flexibility of VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance as an excellent way to “front end” their large storage servers in a rapidly changing UNIX environment. This was particularly important to them since their current method of capacity planning requires months of preparation and capacity can only be changed yearly. ▼ Large financial institutions with a mixed environment of Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT servers. One of our customers has been looking for a solution to assign capacity on a SAN and understand that the administrative interface presented by the VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance makes it easy to assign storage for their dynamically changing storage requirements. ▼ Large newspapers. One metropolitan newspaper that we met with has a growing capacity challenge with their current Microsoft Exchange environment. A storage server built with VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance could significantly ease the management of assigning and growing capacity for each of the Exchange servers. ▼ Companies who are in the business of providing large images, either graphic or video, look at a SAN as a great way to provide high performance commonly shared storage at a high sustained read transfer rate. They also need a way to manage access to storage for both Solaris and Windows NT environments. VERITAS Storage Appliance can address these needs. Eight: Standards-Based Solutions The systems need to be based on standards, so they can support storage clients across a range of operating system environments. This seems like a tall list of requirements, but they are being fully met by a new software suite called VERITAS SANPoint™ Storage Appliance. This suite, first released at the close of 1999, is moving to broader distribution now. VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance is based on VERITAS Volume Manager™ and VERITAS File System™. What we discuss here is the software suite for SANs requiring a direct connection to disk. There is also a version for centralizing file-based storage on a standard network (File Server Edition), very similar to what we are describing here. As mentioned in the last issue of VOX, VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance won the “Best Technology for 2000” award at Strategic Research’s I/O Technologies Forum and Expo in January of this year. It has been demonstrated at several trade shows and presented to individual customers in need of an effective data storage management strategy. We have found the VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance to be welcomed enthusiastically each time we showed it to data managers in charge of dynamically changing and growing storage environments. So far, there are several types of enterprises that are likely to benefit from this solution: ▼ If the storage environment in your business is in any way similar to the ones mentioned here, VERITAS SANPoint Storage Appliance may be of value for you. To explore this further, please visit the VERITAS website for more information. You can also contact me, Bruce Naegel, at [email protected]. Credit card processing companies that create a large amount of data. One institution we met with appreciated the ease of use and Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 29 SAN SOLUTIONS VERITAS SANPoint™ Control A Powerful Centralized Management Tool to Realize SAN Potential By Gina Kieslich, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SAN Management Increased Manageability and Controlled Costs with Data-Centric Management SAN (storage area network) deployment promises numerous advantages, including cost management through storage consolidation, higher availability of data, better performance, and seamless management of online and offline data. Successful SAN deployment depends on how well the complex enterprise SAN environment can be managed. The benefits of optimizing data storage resource use and reducing the total cost of systems ownership with a SAN will only be realized when data managers enjoy full control over it. VERITAS Volume Manager™, SANPoint Control enables a single point of management, from logical unit (LUN) to interconnect and to SAN-connected hosts. Host-, deviceor fabric-based maps give customizable intuitive views into a SAN as well as realtime events in the SAN to diagnose and avoid outages. By masking the administrative complexity of the SAN environment, VERITAS SANPoint Control allows the potential of SANs to be realized today. Independent of any hardware platform, VERITAS is uniquely positioned to leverage partnerships, allowing it to build bridges across all SAN layers, in any direction. VERITAS SANPoint Control was built for SAN management regardless of the hardware The complexities of a heterogeneous SAN environment need to be masked so that administrators can maintain a datafocused perspective on management tasks, regardless of the underlying device environment. VERITAS SANPoint™ Control allows datacentric management from the device through the interconnect on to the host and into the application. VERITAS SANPoint Control is the most advanced, easy to use, centralized management tool for automatic discovery, visualization and zoning administration of all SAN-connected devices available today. Leveraging VERITAS’ breakthrough V3 technology and existing industry standards, SANPoint Control provides the first drag and drop zoning capabilities in a heterogeneous storage area network. Building on the unique storage virtualization capabilities of 30 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS With VERITAS SANPoint Control, administrators can see that a switch is connected to a host at port 5, get real-time information about a problem HBA, and reallocate storage resources by adding a tape drive to a zone. environment, and its modular architecture makes it easy to add support for new standards and devices. As the SAN grows with the enterprise and the technology itself changes, our partnerships with other leading industry hardware vendors and our participation in the SAN standards initiatives ensure that we continue to deliver the availability, scalability and manageability that data managers need. Comprehensive, Automatic SAN Discovery Data storage administrators can realize an instant return on their investment as SANPoint Control automatically, comprehensively and accurately discovers all SAN components down to the data volume. Using various protocols, inband and out-of-band, and leveraging industry standards, SANPoint Control captures details including worldwide name, firmware level, status, interconnect vendor, port count, model, version number, and more. SANPoint Control also gives an administrator the ability to define an infinite number of custom device attributes, such as asset tag number, physical location, install date, contact information, and many others. It includes full inventory reporting capabilities for all SAN equipment. Disconnected devices persist to show where the device was connected. Centralized SAN Visualization SANPoint Control’s console has three panels, which work in harmony with each other. They allow the user to drill down and display information as it relates to the entire fabric, storage devices, interconnect, or host. The main panel displays a topology map that gives an overall picture of the SAN’s connectivity in SAN SOLUTIONS real time. SAN navigation is made easy with the ability to zoom in on specific areas of the overview window and isolate issues, customizing the view. Integrated tool tips help to easily identify devices and interconnect paths by simply moving the mouse over the icon or path. To ensure that the topology map groups the devices correctly, the administrator can define enclosures to maintain the correct device map. SANPoint Control streamlines this task with an Enclosure Wizard that dynamically groups devices in userdefined enclosures. SANPoint Control gives a choice of three different tree views to focus on specific management areas: SAN fabric, host-to-storage connectivity, or device-specific. SANPoint Control’s interface reflects these choices in the topology map by highlighting the entire fabrics, hosts, or devices. The administrator sees immediately where in the SAN these items are physically located. An attribute table displays all of the details about items selected on the tree, including names of unzoned, zoned and unconnected hosts, devices, and device or host ports. The comprehensive search capability uses more than fifty different criteria to quickly locate any device that cannot be found in the tree including world wide name, vendor name, serial number, port ID and many more. For increased convenience, SANPoint Control permits the interconnect management tool or other element manager supplied by the SAN switch vendor to be launched in context. In addition, the administrators can telnet to any telnet device to manage it directly from the command line. Centralized, User-Friendly and Highly Efficient Zone Management VERITAS SANPoint Control allows data managers to centrally define, create and manage storage zones from a single console, so only a specified host can gain access to storage resources. Managing zones in a SAN environment usually requires learning new tools from many vendors or running proprietary telnet. SANPoint Control includes a Zone Wizard to easily create or modify a zone. Alternatively, to quickly rezone storage or a host, the administrator can right click on the device and add or remove it from a zone. One can easily view details of all members in a zone and visually identify them in the topology by their highlighted icons. Connectivity mapping traces physical connections of SAN layers and further aids in zoning and storage allocation. When they first launch SANPoint Control, administrators see the SANPoint Control Taskpad. This pop-up screen allows for fast initiation of common SAN management functions, for example, creating a zone, modifying a zone, creating a storage enclosure, and viewing realtime events. These tasks can be as simple as going directly to the realtime event viewer or launching wizards that make day to day SAN management easy. The Taskpad can also be launched directly from the console. The realtime event viewer for monitoring device status makes extensive proactive management capabilities available. Events can be displayed in a separate “tear-off” window to avoid distraction from other tasks. Integration with VERITAS Volume Manager for Complete SAN Virtualization When VERITAS Volume Manager is combined with SANPoint Control, information about the SANconnected volumes is displayed in “VERITAS SANPoint Control supports our open-SAN vision by providing an elegant way to simplify the administrative complexity of managing multivendor SANs.” the centralized SANPoint Control console, resulting in one single point of management and total control from LUN to interconnect to SANconnected host. VERITAS SANPoint Control and VERITAS Volume Manager facilitate the allocation of unzoned resources and dynamic storage allocation to any host, allowing resources to be consolidated and deployed as needed. Tiered Security to Fully Safeguard SAN Integrity SANPoint Control uses a two-tiered security model that makes sure unauthorized users cannot access SAN settings. To ensure that administrators and operators have the access they require, SANPoint Control offers two modes of security access – administrator and user. The administrator can make changes and zone the SAN, while users are limited to viewing the information. Online help and manual pages assist users and administrators with complete documentation. SANPoint Control supports Solaris 2.7 and 2.8. Future versions will support additional operating systems, including Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 by the end of this year as well as additional UNIX variants (HP-UX, AIX) and Linux. VERITAS SANPoint Control 1.0 will be available from VERITAS SAN resellers and direct from VERITAS, in August 2000. VERITAS backs up SANPoint Control with our SANPoint Consulting Services to maximize the value of this solution for customers. See page 32 for more information. Yoshida Vice-President Data Networking Solutions Hitachi Data Systems Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 31 NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES VERITAS SANPoint Consulting: ™ Bringing SAN Technology Home V ERITAS Software and VERITAS Consulting go hand in hand. In addition to their own rich experience, our consulting staff have the full expertise of VERITAS’ engineering and support available during consulting engagements. In return, the consultants play a key role in giving engineering real world feedback. Customers can have a very high degree of confidence that the job is done right by the best experts in the field. We all know that the volume of data generated by the modern commercial enterprise continues to accelerate. The criticality of data has also increased to the point that the business has no separate existence from the data anymore. This intensification stresses data storage infrastructures and calls for new solutions outside the boundary of traditional networks. Storage area networks (SANs) offer compelling options previously unavailable for sharing storage. Many organizations are embracing this new storage paradigm because it allows them to manage costs while the amount of storage capacity increases dramatically, and deliver 24xforever data availability for end users. While the new technology is very promising, SANs also challenge data managers’ expertise. Implementing the modern SAN requires careful analysis of the storage environment and knowledge of the current state of various industry standards. Through the three components of SANPoint™ Consulting - SAN Assessment, SAN Design, and SAN Software Deployment -, VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services bring 32 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS the skill and experience required for successful SAN deployment into your business. There are three main areas of benefit for clients. Cost Savings VERITAS SANPoint Consulting is free of bias towards any hardware vendor, and consultants don’t follow a hardware bias when they analyze customer needs and help design a SAN. Consultants can help customers avoid premature purchases of hardware and software, but on the other hand, will be able to justify any technology acquisition. Risk Reduction Storage area networks are an evolving technology. This new technology requires special skills and experience to carry out an efficient, methodical analysis. SANPoint consultants can greatly reduce the potential for schedule slips, and make sure the SAN and data storage strategy aligns perfectly with business goals. In doing so, they leverage the full breadth of VERITAS’ understanding of high availability technologies. Competitive Edge Minimizing the time to implementation of breakthrough technology can give companies a competitive advantage. SANPoint Consulting is the fastest way to gain the benefits of leading edge technology. VERITAS consultants understand not just the technology, but also the business issues involved. North American Services news articles are by Jim Bahn, Services Product Marketing Manager VERITAS SANPoint Consulting enables customers to fully profit from the new SAN technologies. Enterprises are likely to see convincing results and will continue to benefit from SANs as the technology changes. Most probable benefits include: Ability to share expensive storage peripherals ▼ Reduction of labor costs through centralized storage management ▼ Nondisruptive management using virtual storage pools ▼ Automated storage management to reduce reaction time and prevent failures ▼ Readiness for rapid and unpredictable change by adding storage capacity without downtime ▼ Ability to choose from the entire array of leading vendors ▼ SAN Assessment The main goal of the VERITAS SAN Assessment Service is to analyze the current storage strategy and recommend improvements based on business needs. Additional objectives include: Identify existing performancesensitive areas within the data infrastructure ▼ Determine current storage capacity and projected storage growth rate ▼ Lay the foundation for future storage infrastructure design ▼ The SAN Assessment Service consists of three parts: 1. Obtain Business Objectives – Both short- and long-term business goals must be understood to define a cost effective storage strategy. The NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES chosen storage strategy will be aligned with these goals. for optimum performance and availability. Current storage environment investment will be made use of wherever possible. 2. Analyze Existing Storage Environment – Senior VERITAS consultants analyze the existing storage environment and determine where investment should be made to optimize the storage environment. They consider the dataset growth rate, environment capacity and performance. They leverage physical network wiring and other current infrastructure investment wherever possible. Opportunities for optimization may include: ▼ Freeing up computer resources normally used for backups and storage ▼ Removing backup traffic from interactive LANs ▼ Improving performance and scalability by migrating from bus-attached storage ▼ Greatly reducing the risk of business interruption due to a hardware failure 3. Define Storage Evolution Strategy – Information gathered during the first two steps will be used to identify and articulate a storage evolution strategy. This strategy will include the protection of current storage environment investment wherever possible, as well as the introduction of new, best available components. Consultants will produce a storage profile to consider distribution growth and scale potential for 6-, 12- and 24-month time spans. Significant benefits come about through the introduction of practices such as: ▼ LAN-free backups ▼ Highly available disk subsystems ▼ Server clustering ▼ Storage management Other Deliverables The SAN Assessment Service combines reports, ideas and strategies: The resulting design is flexible. If dataset growth rates are uncertain, it will be robust enough to scale and accommodate the growth. 2. Customization – If off-the-shelf components need to be brought in for a unique customer requirement, consultants will work with custom written scripts and other programs, and supply all relevant documentation. Current storage capacity inventory and usage ▼ Storage growth forecast ▼ Performance conclusions ▼ Recommendations for high-level design concepts ▼ Enterprise wide data consolidation options ▼ SAN Design Leveraging the knowledge of business objectives, storage growth, capacity, and performance characteristics gathered during the SAN Assessment, the primary objective of the SAN Design Service is to produce a storage design that will permit optimum access to business critical data. Other goals include: Test and verify selected storage components ▼ Provide a high level of confidence for SAN implementation ▼ The Design Service takes place in four parts, using the information gathered by the Assessment Service: 1. Topology Design and Resource Location Plan – Using the information already collected, consultants design the storage area network topology. This design includes both a logical and physical view of the SAN, as well as specific hardware and software recommendations. Storage resources such as RAID, JBOD and tape backup will be placed 3. Pilot Testing and Verification – Once the design has been completed and any customization work done, testing and verification begin. VERITAS will use its SAN integration laboratory (iLab) to verify that the components selected during the design phase will function as required. Consultants will fully document all testing. Such vendor independent testing is the best way to assure functionality and gives a high level of confidence in the design. 4. Knowledge Transfer – Operator training and knowledge transfer give customers’ IT professionals the tools needed to successfully manage the resulting design. Other Deliverables The SAN Design Service creates benchmarks and other critical tools: A logical and physical SAN topology map (blueprint) with storage resource placement ▼ Hardware and software component recommendations ▼ Proof-of-concept test criteria and results ▼ Work breakdown structure for implementation ▼ VERITAS SAN Software Deployment Given the complexity of SANs, the challenges of time to production demands, and the challenges of resource availability, VERITAS ProLaunch Deployment Consulting Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 33 NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES offers the best approach to deploying VERITAS SAN solutions. Especially since they now know the client’s business very well, consultants can reduce deployment time, lower the learning curve, and minimize time to production. Fixed in price and scope, ProLaunch uses well tested methods to get new solutions up and running fast. Depending on the software component, they may include: Pre-engagement planning ▼ Product installation ▼ Product configuration ▼ Hands-on knowledge transfer ▼ Site-specific runbook VERITAS NetBackup™ ▼ VERITAS Cluster Server™ (VCS) ▼ VERITAS Foundation Suite™ ▼ ▼ ProLaunch services apply to the following VERITAS products: For more information on SANPoint Consulting, customers in North America should go to our website at www.veritas.com/us/services/cons ultation/sanpoint/. SANPoint™ Control ▼ SANPoint™ Storage Appliance ▼ VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Now Offering High Availability Consulting Services A s we all know, for most businesses today, when something occurs that prevents end users or customers from accessing critical information, business operations to all intents and purposes are over. Managing access to information is referred to as managing availability, and managing availability is more critical than ever. But where do you start? VERITAS has the knowledge and experience to help customers meet desirable levels of availability with confidence through our Enterprise Consulting Services (ECS) High Availability Assessment, ECS High Availability Architecture and Design and ECS High Availability Platform Deployment Consulting Services. Through the use of these key strategic services, you can expect to see a better return on hardware and software investments, reduce the risk of poor system design, benefit from a greater degree of information availability, and be increasingly prepared to meet customers’ expected service levels. This is a critical and confusing area even for many of our highly knowledgeable customers. We feel that, given the complexity of today’s IT infrastructures, mounting urgencies of time to production demands, and the unyielding issue of resource availability, the ECS High Availability Consulting Services deliver the best approach to 34 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS achieving your availability goals. ECS High Availability Assessment In the ECS High Availability Assessment Service our experts help you identify any areas in your IT environment, whether related to people, processes or products, that present a potential threat to meeting needed levels of availability. The assessment focuses on key areas of an IT infrastructure, including operations, scalability, applications availability, data protection and storage management. The assessment includes a comprehensive, management level evaluation of the factors that may affect data availability, given the existing IT infrastructure. The ECS team will deliver a detailed infrastructural analysis that highlights areas of concern, as well as a high level recommended design for addressing these availability issues. Their recommendations will help you make informed decisions on what needs to be done to reduce the risk of application and business outages, and optimize business systems for continued data availability and effective protection. The ECS High Availability Assessment Service also helps to plan infrastructure upgrades, plan expenses for capital equipment and services, and determine what areas need the most attention. ECS High Availability Architecture and Design Service Leveraging the knowledge of your business objectives, growth, capacity, and availability needs gathered during the ECS High Availability Assessment, the main goal of the ECS High Availability Architecture and Design Service is to help you create an infrastructure that will permit optimum access to business critical data. This service furnishes, as needed, detailed hardware and software requirements, custom development, integration testing and solution prototyping. ECS High Availability Platform Deployment Service With the results of the High Availability Architecture and Design Service, ECS Consulting staff can properly plan and implement the optimal high availability solution. The Design and Deployment Services have been separated to allow for economy of scale. Multiple sites may be involved in a complete high availability solution, but we still want to support full customization of individual locations. The High Availability Platform Deployment Service includes detailed implementation planning, fallback plans, exact downtime requirements, exhaustive test plans, complete implementation and testing, and a thorough transfer of knowledge to your data managers. NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services Announces ProLaunch I n order to reduce the time to production and flatten the learning curve associated with implementing new technology, VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services now offers VERITAS ProLaunch Services. ProLaunches are packaged services that are specifically designed to help our customers deploy VERITAS Software products quickly and effectively. ProLaunches take the guesswork out of product implementations, and allow our customers to begin enjoying the benefits of VERITAS Software solutions as soon as possible. At the same time, they can cut down a large amount of administrative overhead, freeing up resources and budget for other opportunities. The resource commitment on the customer side is minimal. Furthermore, having product experts onsite provides an avenue by which ProLaunch customers can gain important product knowledge. Current ProLaunch services include: ▼ VERITAS NetBackup™ ProLaunch ▼ VERITAS Storage Migrator™ ProLaunch ▼ VERITAS Foundation™ ProLaunch ▼ HA/VERITAS Cluster Server™ ProLaunch ▼ VERITAS Editions ProLaunch ▼ VERITAS SANPoint™ Control ProLaunch For more details on ProLaunch, customers in North America should see their VERITAS sales representative, or go to www.veritas.com/us/services/consultation. A Hot Summer at VERITAS Education Services (VES): Updated Technical Training Additional North American Training Centers New eLearning Classes Classroom Training to Boost Productivity VERITAS is introducing new instructor-led courses: ▼ VERITAS NetBackup™ for Windows NT, UNIX and enterprise ▼ Advanced VERITAS NetBackup for Windows NT, UNIX and enterprise ▼ VERITAS Volume Manager (updated) ™ ▼ Advanced VERITAS Volume Manager (updated) These courses are designed for system administrators, system engineers, technical support personnel, and system integration or development staff who will be installing, operating or integrating the latest releases of VERITAS NetBackup and Volume Manager. For the best learning experience, we encourage new customers to first enroll in the associated eLearning courses. With our new classrooms, and more on the way, learning with VERITAS is more convenient than ever. You can find current information on pricing and seat availability in North America by calling 1-800-327-2232 (select option 2 for sales). More North American Classroom Sites Open in Convenient Locations VERITAS Education Services is opening new classrooms in Los Angeles (El Segundo), Dallas, Atlanta, and, soon to come, Detroit and New York City. These new facilities feature state of the art technical training on all VERITAS solutions. The classrooms are almost all equipped with both UNIX and Windows NT equipment, as well as disk arrays, backup devices, and full clustering capability, giving students a great hands-on approach to learning. To complement our classrooms equipped with Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT, we will Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 35 NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES shortly open new HP-UX classrooms in selected North American cities. ▼ New VERITAS Training Partner sites have opened in Omaha, NE, and St. Louis, MO. These locations offer courses in VERITAS NetBackup and Advanced NetBackup, VERITAS Volume Manager and Advanced Volume Manager. Please check the VERITAS website for a listing of all VERITAS Training Partners. It has information about their locations and links to their own websites for more detail. If you would like to receive a monthly e-mail notification on upcoming classroom openings or new courses, just do this: ▼ Go to support.veritas.com ▼ Choose “E-mail notification” ▼ Check “Customer Education” ▼ Give us your information and keep up with developments eLearning – 24 x 7 Training Following up on the success of our VERITAS Backup Exec, VERITAS NetBackup, VERITAS Volume Manager, and VERITAS File System eLearning courses, VES is bringing you two new web-based classes: 36 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS ▼ VERITAS NetBackup BusinesServer 3.4 provides the departmental or workgroup environment with a strong backup system. This course introduces general principles of NetBackup BusinesServer and gives instruction for clientside backup, archive, and restoration procedures for both the UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT/2000 platforms. Participants who finish this course will also acquire sufficient knowledge to use the client functions of the larger enterprise-level NetBackup 3.4 products. • the purpose and function of device and media management, and how to create drive pools and cascaded drive pools • how to schedule and run a simple backup job • procedures for viewing active, scheduled and completed jobs • how to view and generate reports • how to prepare for and submit a basic restore operation For a limited time, this course, usually priced at US$250, is being offered for only US$99. VERITAS Backup Exec 8.0 is a self-paced learning experience for the latest release of VERITAS Backup Exec. For system administrators, systems engineers and technical support representatives, this 4-hour online course trains you in the fundamentals of our Backup Exec NT solution and focuses on the procedural skills needed to carry out basic operations. The course gives you a broad overview of all the capabilities of Backup Exec NT, and includes detailed instruction on the most common features used on the job, such as: With 24x7 accessibility, self-paced eLearning offers customers a convenient and cost effective way to learn about new VERITAS software products and technologies. Prices for the new e-learning courses range from US $100 to US $250. To enroll, or to learn more, please call 1-800-327-2232, and select option 2 for sales, or visit www.veritas.com/us/services/educ ation. • how to install Backup Exec for Windows NT and work with its main console and Backup Assistant for updated availability information. All of these courses will shortly be available in Europe; watch www.veritas.com/uk/services/education/ NORTH AMERICAN SERVICES New Service Converts UNIX File System to VERITAS File System ™ o accomplish the optimal performance, robustness, and manageability required for the support of mission critical applications, many IT organizations are making VERITAS File System™ (VxFS) the primary file system in their UNIX environments. In the past, this could require a significant amount of effort, especially when moving from the Solaris UNIX File System (UFS). Data that was actively being managed by UFS had to be reconfigured to work with VERITAS File System. For companies with large volumes of data, the reconfiguration process often entailed a high cost in labor and time. Some key benefits of the Service are: VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services has designed a UFS to VxFS Conversion Service to assist customers in the process of changing over from UNIX File System to VERITAS File System. In this service, customers benefit from the skill of VERITAS consultants and rest assured that the conversion of their data is handled with the highest level of expertise possible. Customers only need to dedicate minimal resources to the conversion process. T ▼ There is no movement or copying of existing data, which increases reliability and reduces downtime. ▼ Available free space is used to do the conversion without any need for slow backup devices. ▼ We completely replace UFS metadata with VxFS metadata to ensure that you gain all of the benefits of VxFS. ▼ Conversion is performed on a per file system basis for maximum flexibility in scheduling, testing, and implementation ▼ Careful planning of the process makes sure VERITAS consultants understand customer needs and work environment, can work to meet and exceed customer expectations, and deliver on time. ▼ The new file system will be fully tested under strenuous conditions before the customer’s data managers work with it, and all administrators are thoroughly trained on all aspects of VxFS. Every step in the planning and performance of the conversion is meticulously documented. In the beginning, customer or consultants produce a backup of all data to be converted. VERITAS engineering expertise is available to the consultants as needed. They also bring valuable real world customer feedback about VERITAS and its products back home. During the conversion process, consultants can optionally perform any other integration of software or hardware that customers may require. VERITAS Volume Manager may be brought in to dynamically expand UFS if it does not have enough free space available for the conversion. At the end of the process, when all administrators are trained and comfortable, the VERITAS consultants ensure that the customer is fully satisfied with the results. Supported systems: Platforms: Any Sun workstations and servers supported by VxFS Operating system: Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, or higher VxFS Version: Any VxFS that supports Version 4 layout (VxFS 3.2.5 and higher) UFS Version: Any UFS that runs on Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, or higher Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 37 VERITAS IN EUROPE Customer Benefits ▼ Reduced implementation time and cost An Update on VERITAS’ European Customer Services Consulting There have been significant successes when we have been delivering end-to-end projects. We have successfully deployed VERITAS solutions in telcos, finance, ecommerce, and other businesses. This has frequently required our consultants to work to extremely tight deadlines to meet client goals. Check out the web at w w w. v e r i t a s . c o m / u k / c a s e s / for more information. In addition, our Technology Group has been developing a range of packages that ▼ Improve install processes ▼ Aid with conversion ▼ Bring value-add extensions to the products. We are in the process of launching the Application Agent for VERITAS Cluster Server™ (VCS) which allows application processes to be monitored and controlled by VERITAS Cluster Server. This agent can be used in a variety of situations where there are no standard or enterprise agents available. It extends the standard script agent supplied as part of the VCS standard installation to provide generic management of the application through a suite of Perl programs. The agent is responsible for starting, stopping and monitoring the application processes and can be readily extended to integrate with additional monitoring scripts. ▼ Agent can be reused in a number of installations ▼ Simplified post-implementation support ▼ Enables a more stable solution for your computing environment Training and Education We are in the process of upgrading our website in Europe. There will be significant improvements made in the following areas: ▼ Catalog browsing – you will be able to browse the current course schedule to check when classes are running and whether spaces are available on the class. ▼ Online booking – your registration details can be taken online, enabling you to reserve places on a class. Web-based and CBT classes: we are planning to launch our webbased classes across the region during the summer. Again, you can pre-register for advance notification of when this will take place. Please contact our training office at +44 118 9188391 for enquiries or to make a booking - or why not try the web at www.veritas.com/uk/services/ education/ Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS At VERITAS, we know that continuously improving post-sales technical support is an absolute mandate from our customers. The past year has seen significant investments in our ability to deliver on a consistent worldwide basis. “Consistent” and “worldwide” are words that do not easily inhabit the same sentence. Often, technical support organizations are at corporate headquarters and “outlying” regions such as Europe, Australia, Asia and the Pacific region get little or no mindshare when it comes to investment and strategic direction. VERITAS Software doesn’t view technical support in this way. For the past year, technical support has been organized on a worldwide basis with Michael Wentz, the Senior Vice President, heading the organization. Recently, this was taken a step further with the creation of an international technical support team managed by myself, Dave Winpenny. The new support structure directly matches the also changed layout of our sales group, and will be able to much better meet the needs of internal and external customers. VERITAS International Technical Support operates in several centers: Contact Information: Steve Macfarlane, Director Professional Services +44 1932 876822 ••••••••• In How Many Languages Can You Say “Thank You for Calling VERITAS Technical Support?” By Dave Winpenny, Senior Director, International Technical Support We all know how smooth a purchase process can be. Before the purchase 38 order is signed and we have paid, nothing is too much trouble for the supplier. Later, if problems occur after the sale, are you ever able to reach anyone in the company? Chertsey, UK Reading, UK Sydney, Australia Beijing, China Tokyo, Japan Paris, France Shannon, Ireland The centers are staffed with many technical and customer service professionals whose job is to help our customers resolve any issues with VERITAS products. Each of the major enterprise centers delivers support to regions outside their own geographical area during night hours. For instance, a customer from the US calling VERITAS Support at 2:00am is actually talking to a European engineer based in Chertsey. VERITAS IN EUROPE Support skills aren’t limited to technical capability and a flexible schedule. There is the added dimension of language. Often the person calling for support does not speak English and so a very large percentage of our engineers are multi-lingual. The record is currently held by Gunnar in Chertsey. He speaks ten languages and has many years of UNIX experience. The feedback which we have received so far has reinforced our belief that our users value meeting and learning from senior engineering and product experts as well as from each other. There were over 1100 participants. We are already working on the 2001 event and promise even more tutorials, user experiences and varied useful presentations. Using a telephone network built in conjunction with British Telecom/Concert over the past three years, we can identify where in Europe the call originated, and answer in the appropriate language. With the launch of Pay-for-Support in Europe, we can also take credit card information and do authorizations online with the final credit card statement showing either Euros, DM, FF, $ or £. Is Your Data Well? New Seminar Program for Europe In summary, VERITAS Technical Support is expanding across many borders outside the USA to deliver the the worldwide excellence of service that our customers need. Traveling quite a bit, I work with all of the support centers and make sure our staff benefit from each other’s experience. If you have any comments or suggestions for improvements in our support services, please send me an e-mail at [email protected]. ••••••••• NEW!! VERITAS Premier Program for Loyal Customers From June on, VERITAS customers in Europe will have exclusive access to a new web-based loyalty program, available at www.veritaspremier.com. Via the VERITAS Premier website, members will have access to: ▼ Hot news ▼ Product information, offers and competitions ▼ Tutorials, seminars and healthchecks, as well as free passes to industry events ••••••••• ▼ Hospitality events (via VERITAS account managers) ▼ Free evaluation software To apply for membership to the VERITAS Premier program, please e-mail [email protected]. ••••••••• INFORUM 2000: Best Ever European Conference INFORUM 2000, held in London this April, was a very busy event. Despite being very cosy, a good time was had by all. Storage users and vendors came together for a three day conference where many ideas were shared, technology was taken a level deeper, and customers made sure their concerns are understood by VERITAS. VERITAS would like to thank its users and partners for once again ensuring that this event was informative and entertaining, and gave everybody thorough exposure to “the VERITAS Experience.” To see the highlights and review presentations, please visit www.inforum2000.com. INFORUM 2000 was sponsored by Brocade, Computacenter, Compaq, Sun, Silicon TV, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett Packard, StorageTek and Quantum ATL. Other major companies exhibited at the conference and everybody together made the event the leading industry forum for storage users to learn, share experience and meet the major playors in the data storage and availability business. A new set of seminar programs, VERITAS Health Checks, has been launched in the UK. The first series is a hands-on healing approach on how to get the most from your data storage backbone, with practical advice on how to alleviate pain by seeking the relief that networks can experience from data storage management strategies such as storage area networks. The seminar takes an afternoon, and segues into a bone-shaking end to the day with a Go-Karting evening. The first Health Check seminar series took place in May and June. We will be scheduling Health Checks on various critical pain points in September and October. More than likely, we will focus on how to alleviate the pain from your dot-com backbone. To register for a seminar, or to find out more, please e-mail Nuala Fadden at: [email protected] or call 00 44 1189 188481 EUROPEAN EVENTS Summer is vacation season in Europe, and that’s why there are fewer events scheduled than usual. For fully current detail on events dates and locations, please e-mail [email protected]. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 39 SUCCESS STORY GMAC-RFC Uses VERITAS NetBackup™ for Efficient Data Protection in a Heterogeneous Environment Success Stories in Financial Services Using V E R I TA S S o f t w a r e T H E C U S T O M E R GMAC-RFC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GMAC Financial Services, provides capital and investments worldwide through its core businesses in securitization, lending and investment. T H E C H A L L E N G E A single enterprise backup product that could manage Exchange on Windows NT, Oracle on HP-UX and Sequent DYNIX/ptx. T H E S O L U T I O N VERITAS NetBackup ™ for HP and Windows NT VERITAS NetBackup ™ for Microsoft Exchange Server VERITAS NetBackup ™ for Microsoft SQL VERITAS NetBackup ™ for Oracle ® VERITAS NetBackup ™ for EMC EMC Timefinder Integration 40 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS G MAC-RFC, a wholly owned subsidiary of GMAC Financial Services, provides capital and investments worldwide through its core businesses in securitization, lending and investment. The company is the leading non-agency issuer of mortgage-backed securities and a leader in warehouse and construction lending. Headquartered in Minneapolis, GMAC-RFC has over 3,800 employees worldwide with offices in the United States, Mexiko and the United Kingdom. Looking for an Enterprise Backup Solution from a Single Source GMAC-RFC had a variety of backup solutions in their UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT environments. Every system had its own tape device attached and was performing local backups. “At the time, we had 64 servers handling backups in different ways. We also needed to manage our 26 remote sites without nighttime operators. It became obvious that we couldn’t continue to manage our environment with pointto-point tape backups,” says Richard Britton, Director of IT Infrastructure with GMAC-RFC. Mike Hanscom, Systems Engineer with GMAC-RFC, was responsible for implementing an enterprise wide backup environment including disk, tape and server hardware and software. He explains, “When we tried to modify our existing NT backup product to send data to a single tape library, it took days to complete the backups. It was clear we needed a product that could manage our entire environment.” UNIX (HP-UX and Sequent DYNIX/ptx) accounts for 40% of GMAC-RFC’s environment. The remaining 60% is Microsoft Windows NT. GMAC-RFC’s production databases are Oracle on HP-UX, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange. GMAC-RFC was SUCCESS STORY searching for a solution that would handle their entire environment. “When we were selecting vendors, many would either handle our UNIX requirements or our NT requirements,” says Mike Hanscom. “VERITAS NetBackup was the only product that met our requirements for both environments.” VERITAS’ partnerships with major software and hardware vendors were also a deciding factor. “When we learned that VERITAS was working with EMC Timefinder, that VERITAS Volume Management technology would be part of Windows 2000, and that VERITAS File System would be available on Windows 2000, we knew that VERITAS was a better choice as a single vendor solution to manage online data and backups integrating with our preferred hardware and platform vendors.” Performance and proven technology were also key factors in deciding on a backup solution. “We checked out other customers in our area who were using centralized backup solutions. Many were still implementing at the time, but it seemed as though people were pleased with the VERITAS solution. Another surprising thing we found is that many customers told us their benchmarks exceeded the vendors’ claims for performance,” comments Mr. Britton. “That is a rare thing to find these days.” Increased Performance and Manageability with VERITAS NetBackup GMAC-RFC installed VERITAS NetBackup™ for their UNIX and Windows NT environment. They are currently backing up a total of 2TB per week. 150GB of that data is in five 30GB Exchange Info Stores on their Windows NT servers. Backup data is sent to two StorageTek 9740 libraries with ten DLT 7000 drives each. Since implementing NetBackup, GMAC-RFC has received tremendous reliability, performance and operational benefits. “On the NT side, we went from 12 people responsible for handling close to 40 standalone tape devices to three people managing backups to a single library. Our UNIX environment was using three types of tape technology, managing 40 to 50 cartridges a day manually. Now we’re letting VERITAS manage the tapes, using the same NetBackup client with better than a 99% success rate,” explains Mr. Hanscom. GMAC-RFC is also using NetBackup along with Tivoli to manage their remote sites. Richard Britton tells us, “We’ve rolled out NetBackup to half of our remote sites so far. We feel that this solution with our monitoring tools will help us avoid ever putting a nighttime operator at one of our remote sites.” Like the other customers in their area, GMAC-RFC found their actual performance figures to be better than expected. “The biggest success story for us is our Microsoft Exchange Servers. The only failures we’ve experienced backing up Exchange have been due to operator error, or when Exchange has been in some mode that required maintenance,” says Mr. Hanscom. “While the reliability has improved tremendously, it’s the speed that’s awesome and the reliability over network connections that surprised everyone. We can perform a hot backup of our five 30GB Exchange Message Stores in under two hours and can restore them, if we need to, in under three hours.” GMAC-RFC plans to roll out VERITAS NetBackup to the remainder of their 26 remote sites. Mike Hanscom describes the project. “All sites will be identical. What’s nice about NetBackup is its ability to take tapes from remote sites, bring them in and restore them to our location here for troubleshooting, etc. When necessary, we can restore personal files and folders here instead of at the remote site.” Mr. Hanscom intends to use VERITAS Global Data Manager as well as Tivoli to manage the remote sites, the main data center in Bloomington, and two major campuses in Minneapolis. Mr. Britton believes that NetBackup will continue to work for GMAC-RFC into the future. “We expect the current solution to continue work for us. NetBackup has plenty of flexibility to handle our business growth for the next one to two years. Our technology, hardware and software will take us that far, I’m certain.” Mr. Hanscom has been happy with the decision to use NetBackup as well. “We’ve had NetBackup for four months. Reliability is ten times what we had previously and restores for files are just phenomenal. You say ‘restore’ and forget about it.” Several months after the deployment of the VERITAS solutions, Richard Britton has no doubt that GMAC-RFC made some wise decisions in their choice of vendor and software. He says, “We were able to maintain and improve the performance enhancements that showed up after we made the changes, but now we know even better how to fine tune them.” The investments GMAC-RFC made in new technology have wide-ranging implications. “The promise of the new VERITAS technology was really one of increased manageability and performance, but its benefits extend to the entire organization and the way it does business,” says Mr. Britton. “While the reliability has improved tremendously, it’s the speed that’s awesome and the reliability over network connections that surprised everyone. We can perform a hot backup of our 5 30GB Exchange Message Stores in under two hours and can restore them, if we need to, in under three hours." Mike Hanscom Systems Engineer GMAC-RFC Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 41 ASK THE DOCTOR Our own tech doctor answers reader questions about operating systems, Windows 2000, and SANs. VERITAS has just announced an agreement with IBM. I thought you already worked with them? This is a deal we have pursued for almost ten years! By putting VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS File System on AIX/Monterey we will have them available on the majority of open systems that also include HP-UX, Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT. IBM had the last remaining major Unix flavor which we did not have our products available for, and so getting it on this last platform with the backing of IBM has been a major goal of our organization. In addition to this, over time, our other products will be made available on this platform. Watch for more announcements in the future. Do you think SANs are a general wave of the future, or will they remain a solution for large networks and big companies? I think they will become a general wave. As more and more big companies adopt fibre, the manufacturing costs will come down and so the technology will move to small servers. As an example, many people have DVD players in their home that are connected to their amplifiers by fibre – so we are seeing the technology in the home even today. What will happen is that the devices will become fibre-enabled even within the servers, and after this it will just be a case of putting in a fibre hub or switch to connect 42 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS external storage to the servers and you will have your own SAN! VERITAS products they can actually achieve all this. SANs offer a great deal when it comes to data availability, making cost efficient clustering a reality for everyone and better use of devices such as arrays and tape libraries. VERITAS can also help in the planning required for ASPs either through consulting services or our SI-PS partners. I think I understand replication, and I know what clustering is. Can you talk a little about how these two methods work together? Joining replication in with clustering creates a solution that is applicable in many cases, but the most obvious one is for disaster recovery. A disaster in this case is not that a server has failed – that is what the usual clustering is there for, this is a disaster when an entire site is wiped out. At this point you need to get the business back up and running as fast as possible. By deploying VERITAS Global Cluster Manager (GCM) in conjunction with VERITAS Replication solutions you can achieve just this. The replication solutions ensure that the data is up to date on more than one site (yes, you can have more than two if you wish) and then GCM monitors the clusters. When an issue is detected, control for an application can be passed between clusters, rather than between servers in an individual cluster. As the data has been replicated the application can start as rapidly as possible at the new site. GCM with replication can also be used in other areas such as off-host backup. How does VERITAS view the application service provider (ASP) industry? Is that a working business model, and do you support these customers? The application service provider (ASP) market is one that is growing very rapidly at the moment. For these customers, who have customers of their own, data availability is key. More than this, if they can make better use of the resources and provide a better level of availability than before they will stand in good stead for the future. They must also provide an architecture that will accommodate for growth. Using How did the ‘love bug’ and its variations affect VERITAS? Like everyone around the world we were effected – fortunately we have an excellent IS&T department that put the anti-virus remedy for that specific virus on our mail servers as soon as it became available, not to mention notes on the doors to all buildings by 6:00am warning us of the outbreak! For those people who did open the e-mail we have a good backup policy so little if any data was lost. Perhaps one lesson to us all is that a disaster doesn’t have to mean an earthquake or a hurricane, it can appear in the simplest of ways. This outbreak is reported to have cost business around the world more than $7 billion… that’s a lot of wasted money. So plan for such events - a simple backup strategy for all machines, including laptops, is a great start. What do you think the data availability business will look like in ten years? If I knew I would be creating my own startup as I write. But I don’t… I do know there will be more data than we could possibly believe (how much data did you think you would have 10 years ago!?!?), and people will also want more access to it – on the road and at home, through PDAs, WAP phones and other cool gadgets that we haven’t even thought about. So, with all this data about and people depending on it, the availability will become even more important than it is today. To that end I see we will need new paradigms in backing it up and maintaining the availability – replication will become a key technology along with hierarchical storage management. This availability will be enabled and enhanced using SANs but no doubt ASK THE DOCTOR there will be new technology breakthroughs in both hardware and software which will make today’s state of the art solution look like an antique in comparison. What do I have to do if I enroll on a beta program? We run beta programs for new products and for new versions of existing products. At any one time there could be half a dozen beta programs running across the company. The programs are designed to help in creating a better product by the time it is released. This involves fixing any small problems found and clarifying new features or making them easier to use. So, what we look for is people who are willing to install the product (not on a production system) and to use it. Furthermore, you should be willing to provide honest feedback on what you think – both good and bad, as well as reporting any issues you run into. It might sound like quite a lot of work, but it isn’t, and you get to be one of the first to use the new product. There are contact systems engineers to help with the installation and monitoring process and they, in turn, have access to both support and engineering to get any issues that arise resolved quickly. We often have special training courses to go over the new features. They are given jointly by engineering and product management, and will give you an opportunity to mix with us and to really influence the product and the features you want to see in it. Doc, will you be at VERITAS VISION 2000 in Las Vegas, and will you maintain your secret identity? I will be there – but in disguise. Come and find me at the “birds of a feather” sessions. Questions? E-mail: [email protected] VERITAS Gives Back to the Community Last May, VERITAS hosted the first annual Friends of VERITAS charity golf tournament at the University of Maryland Golf Course, organized by Brian Doody, Eva Doyle, Quindith Lispcome and Wayne Webster. A number of VERITAS partners were invited to participate in the event. Sixteen teams of four competed in pursuit of the coveted Number One spot. All teams were asked to make a donation, and all proceeds, $10,000, were presented to the Bethesda Baptist Home for Children and Families. Making the tournament an annual event, VERITAS is already planning to hold next year’s competition on Friday, May 11th. The event gives VERITAS the opportunity to interact with its partners in a casual, fun setting, and is an avenue for it to make a contribution to the community. For more information, please contact Stacey Ruscette in our Public Relations department at [email protected]. From left to right: Mike Coney, VERITAS Software; Dr. Sheryl Brissett-Chapman, Executive Director of the Bethesda Baptist Home; Joe Muscarella, VERITAS Software. This event was not related to the recently formed VERITAS Foundation, which VOX will tell you more about in one of the next issues. The VERITAS Foundation supports charitable causes in the communities where we work and live. Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS 43 NORTH AMERICAN CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS Date Event Location August 14-17 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo San Jose Convention Center Booth 602, San Jose, CA September 10-13 Disaster Recovery Journal’s Fall World 2000 Coronado Springs Resort Orlando, FL September 11-13 HP World 2000 Pennsylvania Convention Center, Booth 1145 Philadelphia, PA September 26-28 NetWorld+Interop Fall Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, GA October 1-5 Oracle Open World Moscone Center, Booth 1326, San Francisco, CA October 17-19 Gartner Group Fall Symposium/ITExpo Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel, Lake Buena Vista, FL VERITAS VISION2000 Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, NV – Please read coverage on pages 16/17 in this issue October 22-24 October 23-27 Fall Internet World 2000 TBD, New York, NY November 13-17 Comdex Fall 2000 Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV Part No. 90-00350-399 VERITAS Software Corporation Corporate Headquarters 1600 Plymouth Street Mountain View, CA 94043 E-mail: [email protected] 44 Issue 3.2 • VOX VERITAS Dear Reader: Soon, VOX will be three years old. The magazine has had an eventful life, accompanying the rapid growth of VERITAS and telling you about new solutions and approaches in data storage management and high availability. VOX speaks to you, but what would you say to VOX? What would you like to see in it that we’re not covering now? What of the existing features would you like to see changed? What articles did you enjoy, which did you hate? Do you like the hardcopy, or would you prefer we mail a CD instead? This issue 3.2 is the largest we’ve ever published. Some people think we might want to bring out VOX every two months instead of quarterly. What do you think? Please send your comments to Chris Lemoine, the editor, at [email protected]. You may have noticed that recent issues of VOX are now featured on our website under www.veritas.com/us/aboutus/vox, where the zipped files can be downloaded. Do you know somebody that you want to receive VOX? Please e-mail the name and address to [email protected], and we’ll make sure they get their free subscription. Thank you so much for reading VOX! Please be sure to let us know what you think of it.