Tape capacity. It should be straight forward, but many people tend to look at only the biggest, most optimistic numbers, and assume the best. In backup, this is a mistake, and one which I’ve seen consistently made the entire time I’ve been working in the industry. These days, when it comes to tape, LTO is [...]
A long time ago, in a NetWorker far, far away, all the output of a savegroup was included in the notification it generated. Eventually, this was determined to be too problematic – when it worked, it was good, but if a group had some major issue (or someone turned on the verbose flag), notification messages [...]
On one of my lab environments I recently had a problem where the devices (AFTD) on a firewalled storage node suddenly stopped working. This manifested in a fairly odd way: NetWorker was still running on the storage node; nsrports was still perfectly functional in both directions; echo “print type: NSRLA” | nsradmin -p 390113 -s [...]
NetWorker and firewalls has always been a bit of a challenging combination. It’s become increasingly simplified over time – to the point where even a network luddite such as myself can readily configure ports access across a firewall – so long as the firewall administrators or interface are cooperative. But the rub has always been [...]
Running between December 11, 2012 and 31 January 2013, the NetWorker Usage Survey switched from a bi-yearly to a yearly activity and continued to track trends within the NetWorker user community, as well as ask new questions relating to organisational structure for backup administrators, and backup methods used for virtual machines. The results are now [...]
One question you’ll periodically see raised in NetWorker forums is … “why am I getting a bootstrap backup with every backup?” The answer is actually a fairly simple one: if the backup server is in an auto-starting group, then every time that auto-starting group is run, you’ll get a bootstrap backup. However, if the backup [...]
There’s a few very important rules to follow when it comes to NetWorker groups: Maintain an air-gap: Ensure there’s at least 5, preferably 10 minutes, between the start time for any two NetWorker groups. This even includes groups that won’t run due to schedules. (E.g., a Daily group, and a Monthly group for the same [...]
I was rather chuffed, in December, to be nominated to the new EMC Elect programme, and humbled to be informed a couple of days ago that I’ve been accepted into it. The directory of all members for 2013 can be found here, and I’m grateful to have been added to a rather prestigious list of [...]
A common question that you see fielded regularly is whether or not it’s “best practice” to have dedicated index pools. To me, there’s only a couple of pros to having index backups in their own pools, and a lot of potential cons. Pros In the event of needing to perform a total index restore, all [...]
NB: Don’t forget to fill in the NetWorker Usage Survey, if you haven’t already done so. It’s open until 31 January 2013. NetWorker has a bunch of predefined pools that come in the bootstrap configuration: Default, Default Clone, Offsite, Archive, etc. For the purposes of best practices, I’d suggest these pools should be used for reference [...]