Aside – My Number #1 Pet Peeve in Interface Design

 Aside, General thoughts  No Responses »
Dec 202009
 

At University, I had a fascinating lecturer. His typical mode of dress was a t-shirt, stubbies and to go barefoot around the campus. He had a great big bushy beard that barrelled along in front of him which at times looked like a mane. He had a reputation for reciting the entirety of The Ballad of Eskimo Nell (a rather ribald poem – I’m not providing a link) – though by the time I was at University, he could only ever be encouraged to let fly with a single verse.

None of this though made him fascinating.

What made him fascinating was his name. For your reference, his full name is:

Simon

That’s right, Simon. Just a first name, no last name. You see, at some point in the past Simon had decided to legally remove his surname. So he literally did not have a last name.

Simon was a fascinating case study in the implications of unexpected input in computer programmes. He was in fact a walking case study in the implications of unexpected input in computer programmes – almost exclusively due to his name. (This led me to having some joy in pointing out this XKCD cartoon to him a couple of years ago.) Every year, the people who made the phone book struggled to work out where to put him. He confounded registration systems everywhere, and turned compulsory fields on forms to rubbish. Simon was a walking lesson in the lessons of designing interfaces to handle unexpected inputs.

Not long after I finished University, I decided to change my name. Not anything so drastic as a removal of my surname; in fact, it was to add to my surname. You see, when my family emigrated to Australia several generations ago, they changed their surname from “de Guise” to just “Guise” so they could more easily assimilate. (So the story goes.)

Not being all that interested in blending in, and having an appreciation of the long term history of the name “de Guise”, I decided to reinstate it. (Some might question why I didn’t remove my middle name or at least change it from “Macdonald” – but that’s another story, to be told another time.)

It was at that point that I started to get an appreciation of the daily struggle Simon must have had in dealing with systems that were not adequately designed to work with non-conformist input.

I’ve learned therefore over the years that there’s far too many programmers with names like:

  • Mary Jones
  • Bob Smith
  • David Peterson
  • Jane Davidson

And far too few programmers with names like:

  • Simon
  • Preston de Guise
  • Carlos de la Cruz
  • Peter O’Toole

(I had already learned, by the way, that there were far too few companies that simultaneously employed a McDonald, Macdonald and MacDonald.)

So here’s my pet peeve in interface design, stated as examples:

  • I am not Preston De Guise
  • I am not Preston De guise
  • I am not Preston de
  • I am not Preston De
  • I am not Preston Deguise
  • I am not Preston DeGuise
  • I am not De, Preston Guise
  • I am not even, any longer, just Preston Guise (and I certainly don’t have a middle name of de).

There are too many lazy and/or inconsiderate programmers out there. (There’s also too many lazy and/or inconsiderate data entry operators as well.*)

If you’re a programmer, and want to get onto my good side in 2010, make sure your system gets my name right.

–
* In the past I have been guilty of name mutilation myself. In my last job I setup an account for someone, mistaking the first word of her surname as a middle name, and egregiously never got around to correcting it. It is actually something I genuinely regret.

 Posted by at 05:06  Tagged with: ,

What's been happening this week?

 Aside  2 Responses »
Dec 182009
 

It’s been a fairly interesting week overall in storage.

There’s still been a lot of chatter about FAST, EMC’s new system for having LUNs automatically moved between different tiers of storage. I clearly need to read up more about FAST, because so far I don’t see it so much as FAST but as 2nd gear. Sure, being able to automatically move whole LUNs around is nice, but I thought the magic was in sub-LUN migration years ago when I saw a Compellent demo on it. Clearly I’m missing something, because a lot of people have been getting very excited. Then again, my focus in storage has been protecting it rather than optimising primary access, so it’s likely I’ll get more interested in it as I read more about it.

Over at Search Storage, there was an interesting article about data reduction vs data deduplication and compression. This prompted me to pull my finger out, and so sometime soon I’ll have another blog article myself here called All this Deduplication is Making me Thirsty. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader what I’m talking about (or a surprise for the article.)

Moving on, I found this excellent article by Drew Robb over at ServerWatch called Tape vs Disk: Tape Refuses to be Evicted. Regular readers of my blog will know that my opinion on the “tape is dead” pronouncements we get every few months is to blow a big fat raspberry at move on. Drew’s article was pointedly useful, in that he dug into the IDC studies on tape sales. While a lot of the media is enjoying running around saying that IDC shows that tape sales are declining, they’re not telling the whole truth, as Drew points out. In actual fact, it’s the low end tape sales that are falling off quite a bit, but the enterprise stuff is still running along quite nicely. This is completely understandable – I’ve seen a lot of small businesses that used to rely on cheap and cheerful tapes like DAT transition to more reliable and longer lasting media, but I don’t see a lot of enterprises killing tape. (What’s the old saying from that old ad – linear serpentine, good for data; helical scan, good for parties … I think the party is fizzing out, but the data is still going strong…)

I think when it comes to handing out awards (if I were to do that) for the coolest storage blog entries this week, they have to go to Storagebod, with his 7 part series of letters to father christmas – including the final one asking for presents for other bloggers.

Over at Grumpy Storage, Ian penned a fantastic article called Show me the Money. I think this should be mandatory reading for every sales person and consultant in the tech industry – certainly in previous companies I’ve dealt with sales people who have been shot down and lost deals for failing to follow these rules that should be self evident.

On the lighter side, someone (apologies, I can’t remember who) twittered a link to Death By Powerpoint. This should be mandatory watching for everyone in business, full stop.

On a more local front, Brian over at Going Virtual has just done his wish list for updates to NetWorker for 2010 in relation to virtualisation support.

On a slightly different note, our Australian government has decided it’s going to attempt to introduce national mandatory net censorship laws next year. I would say what I think about such draconian subjects except it would undoubtedly be retroactively censored next year and this article deleted. I’d hate to upset my article count, so suffice to say, in a more polite way, that I hope they take notice of online polls that show upwards of 95% of people against the idea.

Over at Daring Fireball (yes, I know, not a storage blog), John Gruber has a rather excellent analysis of the garbage that’s been coming out of AT&T lately. Apparently they only want customers to buy, not use bandwidth. Silly, selfish users who expect to be able to buy and then use their services are apparently to blame for profit obsessed companies that have no interest in upgrading their infrastructure to meet needs.

Over on the The Register, there was a story about Stratus putting their money where their mouths are. Good on you Stratus.

Next to last, as a bit of self-advertising, I took time out from this blog to write up some thoughts on all those marketing slides that encourage people to do TCO calculations to compare pushing infrastructure out of the data centre and into the Public Cloud, and suggested that an alternate calculation needs to follow, one that I call Total Cost of Impact.

One final comment: please go and see Avatar. If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on the greatest block buster of all time (so far). If you’re a Star Wars fan, you doubly need to see it, so you can understand what a good movie looks like.

 Posted by at 11:06

Introducing the Support and Services page

 Aside  No Responses »
Dec 172009
 

Regular visitors may note that there’s a new addition to the pages on this blog – one covering Support and Services.

I run this blog in my own time (probably using up a little too much of my own time to be quite truthful) and ask for no payment or reimbursement from my readers – well, other than an occasional pitch for people to buy my book, that is.

My day job however is a consultancy and support role at IDATA Resolutions, and the Support and Services page outlines some of the key things IDATA could do for you, if you happen to be looking for service, support, consulting or training for your environment.

If you’re looking for an independent review of your environment, or considering support options, looking at a new solution or needing some training (whether that’s one-on-one, customised or general), I’d invite you to check out the Support and Services page above to see what IDATA can do for you.

 Posted by at 07:18  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Pictorial representation of management happiness over OpEx cost savings

 Architecture, Backup theory  4 Responses »
Dec 162009
 

There is a profoundly important backup adage that should be front and centre in the mind of any backup administrator, operator, manager, etc. This is:

It is always better to backup a little more than not quite enough.

This isn’t an invitation to wildly waste backup capacity on useless copies that can never be recovered from – or needlessly generate unnecessary backups. However, it should serve as a constant reminder that if you keep shaving important stuff out of your backups, you’ll eventually suffer a Titanic issue.

Now, people at this point often tell me either that (a) they’re being told to reduce the amount of data being backed up or (b) it makes their manager happy to be able to report less OpEx budget required or (c) some combination of the two, or (d) they’re reluctant to ask for additional budget for storage media.

The best way to counter these oppressive and dangerous memes is to draw up a graph of how happy your manager(s) will be over saving a few hundred dollars here and there on media versus potential recovery issues. To get you started, I’ve drawn up one which covers a lot of sites I’ve encountered over the years:

Manager happiness vs state of environment and needless cost savings on backupYou see, it’s easy to be happy about saving a few dollars here and there on backup media in the here and now, when your backups are running and you don’t need to recover.

However, as soon as the need for a recovery starts to creep in, previous happiness over saving a few hundred dollars rapidly evaporates in direct proportion to the level of the data loss. There might be minimal issues to a single lost document or email, but past that things start to get rather hairy. In fact, it’s very easy to switch from 100% management happiness to 100% management disgruntlement within the space of 24 hours in extreme situations.

You, as a backup administrator, may already be convinced of this. (I would hope you are.) Sometimes though, other staff or managers may need reminding that they too may be judged by more senior management on recoverability of systems under their supervision, so this graph equally applies to them. That continues right up the chain, further reinforcing the fact that backups are an activity which belong to the entire company, not just IT, and therefore they are a financial concern that need to be budgeted for by the entire company.

 Posted by at 09:19  Tagged with: , , ,

Fingers Crossed for some New Years Resolutions from EMC

 NetWorker  2 Responses »
Dec 152009
 

Over at Storagebod’s Blog, Martin Glassborow has been providing a highly interesting and entertaining set of letters to Father Christmas, which I’d highly recommend reading.

So in the spirit of Martin’s postings, I’m going to do a slight variant – here’s a few things that I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for that EMC will provide us in NetWorker in 2010.

Dear EMC,

Could you please add to your NetWorker New Years Resolution the following items?

  • Windows 2008 Service Pack 2 support as soon as possible!
  • Improvements for ADV_FILE devices:
    • Savesets can spill over from one disk backup unit to another should the first become full.
    • Better rotation/selection method for devices/volumes.
  • Tapes:
    • Ability to query the “offsite” mminfo flag.
  • Cloning:
    • Inline cloning (simultaneous clone + original generation).
    • Fixing the “validcopies” flag!
  • NetWorker Management Console:
    • Manual client backup and recovery operations integrated into the console.
    • Manual module backup and recovery operations integrated into the console.
  • Resources/Configuration:
    • Ability to rename clients (and other resources).
    • Syntax for including another directive within a directive.
    • PIDs for nsrmmds stored within the device resource for easy viewing.
  • Operations:
    • Client GUI manual backups to support pools other than Default.
    • More granular savesets.

I could think of a bunch of other enhancements, but these are the ones I’m hoping most are on your new years resolution list for NetWorker in 2010. I’m hoping I don’t have to put any of these on a wish list for your 2011 new years resolution list.

Thanks, and have a happy new year!

Preston de Guise.

 Posted by at 18:38  Tagged with: , ,

The pros and cons of Legato License Manager

 Licensing, NetWorker  12 Responses »
Dec 152009
 

Bundled with NetWorker for some time now has been the peripheral product, Legato License Manager (LLM). (Now normally just referred to as “License Manager”.)

If you’ve never used LLM, you may wonder what use it serves. But to do that, we first need to look at the control zone, that region of space that encompasses one or more NetWorker datazones. This might resemble the following:

Control and datazonesBoth the NetWorker Management Console (NMC) server (typically the “gst” processes) and LLM reside in the control zone – that is, they exist to service multiple datazones. However, in the same way that many sites end up running the datazone and control zone (via NMC/GST) on the same backup server, there’s nothing preventing you from using LLM to manage licenses separately to the core NetWorker services.

Making this transition is relatively straight forward, and I’ll save doing an article on that aspect unless people would like to see one – instead, I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of having licenses outside of NetWorker but still referenced by a NetWorker server.

Advantages of LLM

It’s best to first understand what LLM brings to you. I’ll use the following keys beside the advantages to let you know where they’re applicable:

  • (D+) – Useful for multiple datazones.
  • (1D) – Useful for single datazones.
  • (M) – Marketing advantage; touted as a bonus by EMC/Legato, rarely if ever used.

So, some of the advantages are:

  • (D+) Licenses may be purchased and installed in a central location.
  • (D+) Licenses may be reallocated between NetWorker servers as resource requirements/capabilities change (i.e., released from one server, and snapped up by another).
  • (1D/D+) License authorisation codes are tied to the LLM server, not the NetWorker server. Therefore if you’ve got an environment where you’re planning on doing some NetWorker server migrations, you can move your licenses to LLM and not have to repeatedly do host transfers.
  • (M) You can buy “bulk” licenses. (E.g., 10 x 5 Client Connection Licenses). This advantage seems to be minimising the number of licenses you need to enter. While this sounds cute in theory, I think it actually adds a layer to license complexity.
  • (1D/D+) Licenses reported in NMC show the exact features they are being used for – e.g., instead of showing “NetWorker Server, Network Edition/125″ to indicate that the server is licensed for 125 clients, you might see “NetWorker Server, Network Edition/93″ to indicate that currently there are 93 client licenses being used.
  • (M) LLM is where the full version of NMC is licensed, so you only have to learn one licensing administration system.

Disadvantages of LLM

The advantages of LLM don’t come without some disadvantages too. These are:

  • Not all licenses work all the time with LLM. For example, historically there has been ongoing issues with creating dedicated storage nodes in an environment using LLM. Typically it’s been necessary to add both a dedicated and a full storage node license, create the dedicated storage node devices, then delete the full storage node license. (Messy.)
  • When working outside of NMC, the command line access to LLM licenses (via lgtolic) is even more esoteric and preposterous to use than nsrcap and nsradmin.

Should you use LLM?

It depends on your site. If you’re a fairly small environment, I can’t see any purpose for switching from NetWorker licensing to LLM; however, if your site has a larger number of clients and is reasonably dynamic in client allocations, LLM may give you that extra easy oversight to justify switching to it even if you’ve only got one datazone in your environment.

Alternatively, if you’re planning to transition your backup server a few times over a shorter period (e.g., migrating from current old hardware to interim hardware to full new hardware), then moving licenses out of NetWorker and into LLM may save you the hassle of getting them re-authorised at each step.

Should your LLM server be considered “production”?

If you’re using LLM, the obvious question that some will ask is – can this just be plonked on any old desktop PC? The answer is no. Well, to qualify that answer a bit – nothing prevents you from doing this except common sense. By all means have this running as a virtual machine somewhere, but it should still be considered a production machine in the same way that a backup server is a production machine: it’s part of support production rather than primary production, but it’s still production.

 Posted by at 06:35  Tagged with: , , , ,

15 crazy things I never want to hear again

 Backup theory, General Technology, Policies, Quibbles  1 Response »
Dec 142009
 

Over the years I’ve dealt with a lot of different environments, and a lot of different usage requirements for backup products. Most of these fall into the “appropriate business use” categories. Some fall into the “hmmm, why would you do that?” category. Others fall into the “please excuse my brain it’s just scuttled off into the corner to hide – tell me again” category.

This is not about the people, or the companies, but the crazy ideas that sometimes get hold within companies that should be watched for. While I could have expanded this list to cover a raft of other things outside of backups, I’ve forced myself to just keep it to the backup process.

In no particular order then, these are the crazy things I never want to hear again:

  1. After the backups, I delete all the indices, because I maintain a spreadsheet showing where files are, and that’s much more efficient than proprietary databases.
  2. We just backup /etc/passwd on that machine.
  3. But what about /etc/shadow? (My stupid response to the above statement, blurted after by brain stalled in response to statement #2)
  4. Oh, hadn’t thought about that (In response to #3).
  5. Can you fax me some cleaning cartridge barcodes?
  6. To save money on barcodes at the end of every week we take them off the tapes in the autochanger and put them on the new ones about to go in.
  7. We only put one tape in the autochanger each night. We don’t want <product> to pick the wrong tape.
  8. We need to upgrade our tape drives. All our backups don’t fit on a single tape any more. (By same company that said #7.)
  9. What do you mean if we don’t change the tape <product> won’t automatically overwrite it? (By same company that said #7 and #8.)
  10. Why would I want to match barcode labels to tape labels? That’s crazy!
  11. That’s being backed up. I emailed Jim a week ago and asked him to add it to the configuration. (Shouted out from across the room: “Jim left last month, remember?”)
  12. We put disk quotas on our academics, but due to government law we can’t do that to their mail. So when they fill up their home directories, they zip them up and email it to themselves then delete it all.
  13. If a user is dumb enough to delete their file, I don’t care about getting it back.
  14. Every now and then on a Friday afternoon my last boss used to delete a filesystem and tell us to have it back by Monday as a test of the backup system.
  15. What are you going to do to fix the problem? (Final question asked by an operations manager after explaining (a) robot was randomly dropping tapes when picking them from slots; (b) tapes were covered in a thin film of oily grime; (c) oh that was probably because their data centre was under the area of the flight path where planes are advised to dump excess fuel before landing; (d) fuel is not being scrubbed by air conditioning system fully and being sucked into data centre; (e) me reminding them we just supported the backup software.)

I will say that numbers #1 and #15 are my personal favourites for crazy statements.

 Posted by at 05:52  Tagged with:

Maybe I'm just an old Unix hack…

 Aside, General Technology  3 Responses »
Dec 132009
 

In the land of Dilbert, I’d probably be obligated to wear suspenders and have my socks pulled up past my knees, but ultimately I think I’m becoming an old Unix hack. Why?

  • Not because of my disdain for Windows. (Though that probably helps.)
  • Not because of my passion for Linux. (I have little in that regard.)
  • Not because of my rigid adherence to a particular Unix platform. (Used to be Solaris, now Mac OS X.)
  • Because of my ongoing use of vi.

I’ve been using Mac OS X now since 2005. The date is fairly well fixed in my head simply because it happened about a month after 10.4 (Tiger) was released. It’s also fixed in my head since I’ve never been as productive on a computer as I am on a Mac.

The Mac has changed a lot of my workflows, but the one thing that it hasn’t changed is the absolute automatic way I lunge for vi whenever I need to edit text, source code, etc. Now, I’ll admit I have the absolutely fantastic BBEdit program from Bare Bones Software. I even use it a lot of the time for in-depth coding across a lot of files. I’d certainly recommend anyone doing lots of software development on the Mac outside of Xcode to buy a license.

But it’s never what I open first when I need to edit a file. There’s something so spartan and uncomplicated about vi. (Which incidentally is probably why emacs just never appealed. It was never spartan or uncomplicated – at least in my opinion.)

I know it’s arcane. The idea of a editor mode and a control mode freaks a lot of people out. The use of freaky control commands that make WordStar look like the Paragon of User Interface Design take a lot of getting used to. Yet, whenever I’m in Word, or OpenOffice*, or even BBEdit, I still find myself automatically trying to type in vi search and replace commands. (Hint to any Bare Bones product manager that stumbles across this. Please please, pretty please, can we get a “vi” mode in BBEdit?)

To me, and I know a lot of Mac users out there will probably have a conniption in response to what I’m going to say: vi is a lot like Mac OS X. It’s like a butler. It doesn’t jump up and down and pester you every 5 minutes (like Windows) about what you want to do, or that you’ve got an icon not being used on your desktop, or that a new network was found, or any other garbage like that. It just hangs back, lets you work, and jumps to your assistance when you want it.

Call me an old Unix hack if you want, but I can’t go a day without vi. Being able to do things such as the following:

(esc) :.,$s/^/insert into blah(x) values(‘/

(esc) :.,$s/$/’);/

Is for some reason vitally important to my ability to work productively. Heck, I even use vi in NetWorker, thanks to default editor settings and nsradmin‘s response to the keyword ‘edit’ on Unix platforms.

I think every technical person who works on heterogenous systems should learn vi. It’s pretty much the one interactive editor you can guarantee being available on every Unix system. (Discounting ‘ed’, and disrespecting emacs ;-) ) I can also guarantee that anyone who has used vi for more than 5 minutes and successfully saved a document can navigate around the user interface behaviours of the Windows default editor, ‘notepad’, or the Mac OS X default editor, ‘Text Edit’. The same isn’t in reverse, and I find that a lot of say, Windows admins who start doing bits and pieces of work on Unix systems are usually hampered by the entire vi experience. vi, it seems, is suitably foreign to people who grow up in GUI only environments that it taints the entire Unix interactivity process. However, being an old Unix hack, I don’t think this is vi‘s fault. Indeed, I’d suggest that anyone who can’t type “vi quick reference card” into Google and then use the results productively is doing themselves a disservice.

If you’re a Windows admin and you’ve just assumed I’m having a dig at you for not knowing vi, I’m not. Like knowing a cross platform scripting language (e.g,. perl), I merely recommend that administrators in heterogenous environments enjoy their job more, and can do their job more easily, if they know vi.

Oh, and as a final point, can someone please explain why almost everyone else on the planet except me seems to save and quit in vi either through multiple actions or more obscure commands (e.g., esc :wq) than just:

(esc) :x

–
* And if someone could explain the arrogance of having OpenOffice on the Mac takeover all possible document types whenever it is first run, I’ll be very interested in rebutting your arguments.

 Posted by at 06:05  Tagged with: , , ,

This holiday season, give your inner geek a gift

 Backup theory, General thoughts  4 Responses »
Dec 112009
 

As it approaches that time for giving, it’s worth pointing out that with just a simple purchase, you can simultaneously give yourself and me a present. I’m assuming regular readers of the blog would like to thank me, and the best thanks I could get this year would be to get a nice spike in sales in my book before the end of the year.

“Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy” is a book aimed not just at companies only now starting to look at implementing a comprehensive backup system. It’s equally aimed at companies who are already doing enterprise backup and need that extra direction to move from a collection of backup products to an actual backup system.

What’s a backup system? At the most simple, it’s an environment that is geared towards recovery. However, it’s not just having the right software and the right hardware – it’s also about having:

  • The right policies
  • The right procedures
  • The right people
  • The right attitude

Most organisations actually do pretty well in relation to getting the right software and the right hardware. However, that’s only about 40% of achieving a backup system. It’s the human components – that last remaining 60% that’s far more challenging and important to get right. For instance, at your company:

  • Are backups seen as an “IT” function?
  • Are backups assigned to junior staff?
  • Are results not checked until there’s a recovery required?
  • Are backups only tested in an adhoc manner?
  • Are recurring errors that aren’t really errors tolerated?
  • Are procedures for requesting recoveries adhoc?
  • Are backups thought of after systems are added or expanded?
  • Are backups highly limited to “save space”?
  • Is the backup server seen as a “non-production” server?

If the answer to even a single one of those questions is yes, then your company doesn’t have a backup system, and your ability to guarantee recoverability is considerably diminished.

Backup systems, by integrating the technical and the human aspect of a company, provide a much better guarantee of recoverability than a collection of untested random copies that have no formal procedures for their creation and use.

And if the answer to even a single one of those questions is yes, you’ll get something useful and important out of my book.

So, if you’re interested in buying the book, you can grab it from Amazon using this link, or from the publisher, CRC press, using this link.

 Posted by at 09:49  Tagged with: , ,

Long term NetWare recovery

 NetWorker  No Responses »
Dec 102009
 

Are you still backing up Novell NetWare hosts? If you are, I hope you’re actively considering what you’re going to do in relation to NetWare recoveries in March 2010, when NetWare support ceases from both Novell and EMC.

I still have a lot of customers backing up NetWare hosts, and I’m sure my customer set isn’t unique. While Novell still tries to convince customers to switch from traditional NetWare services to NetWare on OES/SLES, a lot of companies are continuing to use NetWare until “the last minute”.

The “last minute” is of course, March 2010, when standard support for NetWare finishes.

Originally, NetWare support in NetWorker was scheduled to finish in March 2009, but partners and customers managed to convince EMC to extend the support to March 2010, to match Symantec and co-terminate with Novell’s end of standard support for NetWare as well.

Now it’s time we start considering what happens when that support finishes. Namely:

  1. How will you recover long term NetWare backups?
  2. How will you still run NetWare systems?
  3. How will you manage NetWorker upgrades?

These are all fairly important questions. While we’re hopeful we might get some options for recovering NetWare backups on OES systems (i.e., pseudo cross-platform recoveries), there’s obviously no guarantees of that as yet.

So the question is – if you’re still using NetWare, how do you go about guaranteeing you can recover NetWare backups once NetWare has been phased out of existence?

The initial recommendation from Novell on this topic is: keep a NetWare box around.

I think this is a short-sighted recommendation on their part, and shows that they haven’t properly managed (internally) the transition from traditional NetWare to NetWare on OES/SLES. This is perhaps why there isn’t a 100% transition from one NetWare platform to the other. Being faced with unpalatable transition options, some Novell customers are instead considering alternate transitionary options.

Unfortunately, in the short term, I don’t see there being many options. I’m therefore inclined to recommend that:

  1. Companies backing up traditional NetWare who only need to continue to recover a very small number of backups consider performing an old-school migration – recover the data to a host, and backup on an operating system that will continue to enjoy OS vendor and EMC support moving forward.
  2. Companies backing up larger amounts of traditional NetWare should consider virtualising at least one, preferably a few more NetWare systems before end of support, and keeping good archival VM backups (to avoid having to do a reinstall), using those systems as recovery points for older NetWare data.

The longer-term concern is that the NetWare client in NetWorker has always been … interesting. Once NetWare support vanishes, the primary consideration for newer versions of NetWorker will be whether those newer versions actually support the old 7.2 NetWare client for recovery purposes.

With this in mind, it will become even more important to carefully review release notes and conduct test upgrades when new releases of NetWorker come out to confirm whether newer versions of the server software actually support communicating with the increasingly older NetWare client until such time as recovery from those NetWare backups is no longer required.

You may think this is a bit extreme, but bear in mind we don’t often see entire operating systems get phased out of existence, so it’s not a common problem. To be sure, individual iterations or releases may drop out of support (e.g., Solaris 6), but the entire operating system platform (e.g., Solaris, or even more generally, Unix) tends to stay in some level of support. In fact, the last time I think I recall an entire OS platform slipping out of NetWorker support was Banyan Vines, and the last client version released for that was 3 point something. (Data General Unix (DGUX) may have ceased being supported more recently, but overall the Unix platform has remained in support.)

If you’re still backing up NetWare servers and you’re not yet considering how you’re going to recover NetWare backups post March 2010, it’s time to give serious consideration to it.

 Posted by at 04:37  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
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