Holiday Wrap-Up

The holiday season is upon many of us – whether you celebrate xmas or christmas, or just the new year according to the Julian calendar, we’re approaching that point where things start to ease off for a lot of people and we spend more time with our families and friends.

Before I wrap up for the year, I wanted to spend a few minutes reintroducing some of the most popular topics of the year on the blog – the top ten articles based on directly linked accesses. Going in reverse order, they are:

• Number 10 – “Why I’d choose NetWorker over NetBackup every time“. I was basically called an idiot by someone in the storage community for writing this, but the fact remains for me that any backup product that fails to support backup dependencies is not one that I would personally choose. Given that a top search that leads people to the blog is of the kind, “netbackup vs networker” or “networker vs netbackup”, clearly people are out there comparing the two products, and I stand by my support of the primacy of backup dependency tracking.
• Number 9 – “A tale of 4 vendors“. A couple of months ago I attended SNIA’s first Australian storage blogger event, touring EMC, IBM, HDS and NetApp. Initially I’d planned to blog a fairly literal dump of the information I jotted down during the event, but I realised instead I was more drawn to the total solution stories being told by the 4 vendors.
• Number 8 – “NetWorker 7.5.2 – What’s it got?“. NetWorker 7.5 represented a big upgrade mark for a lot of sites, particularly those that wanted to jump the v7.3 and v7.4 release trees. I still get a lot of searches coming to the blog based on NetWorker 7.5 features and upgrades.
• Number 7 – “Using NetWorker Client with Opensolaris“. This was written by guest blogger Ronny Egner, and has seen more interest over the last few months as Oracle’s acquisition continues to grind down paid Sun customers. If you’re interested in writing guest blog pieces for the NetWorker Blog in 2011, let me know!
• Number 6 – “Basics – Fixing ‘NSR peer information’ errors“. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is no valid reason why the resolution for this hasn’t been built into NMC!
• Number 5 – “NetWorker and linuxvtl, Redux“. The open source LinuxVTL project continues to grow and develop. While it’s not suited for production environments, LinuxVTL is certainly a handy VTL to plug into a NetWorker/Linux system for testing purposes. I know – I use it almost every single day.
• Number 4 and Number 3 – “NetWorker 7.6 SP1“. Interest in NetWorker 7.6 SP1 has been huge, and I had two blog postings about it – a preview posting based on publicly shared information from EMC, and the actual post-release article that covered some key features more in-depth.
• Number 2 – “Carry a Jukebox with you (if you’re using Linux)“. The first article I wrote about the LinuxVTL project.
• Number 1 – “micromanual: NetWorker Power User Guide to nsradmin“. The Power User guide to nsradmin has been downloaded well over a thousand times. I’ve been a fan of nsradmin ever since I started using NetWorker and had to administer a few NetWorker servers over extremely slow links (think dial-up speeds). It’s been very gratifying to be able to introduce so many people to such a useful and powerful tool.

Personally this year has been a pretty big one for me. Probably the biggest single event was that my partner and I made the decision to move from central coast NSW to Melbourne, Victoria during the year. We haven’t moved yet; it’s due for June 2011, but it’s going to necessitate a lot of action and work on our part to get there. It’ll be well worth the effort though, and I’ve already reached that odd point where I no longer think of the place I’m living as “home”. The reasons that led us to that decision are covered on my personal blog here. Continuing the personal front, I was extremely pleased to be able to say goodbye to the mobile “netwont” that is Vodafone in Australia. I’ve been using my personal blog to talk about a lot of varied topics running from internet censorship to invasive information requests to more mundane things, such as what makes a good consultant.

Technically I think the coming few years are going to be fascinating. Deduplication has only just started to make a splash; I think it’ll be a while before it becomes as pervasive as say, plain old disk backup, but it will have a continued and growing effect in the enterprise backup market. I predict that another bevy of dopey analysts will insist that tape is dead, just like they have every year for the last 2 decades, and at the end of the year I predict the majority of companies they interface with will still be using tape in some form or another. However, the use of tape will continue to evolve in the marketplace; as nearline disk storage becomes more regular and cheaper for backup solutions, we’ll see tape continue to be pushed out to longer term retention systems and safety nets – i.e., tape is certainly sliding away from being the primary source for recoveries in an enterprise backup environment.

One last thing – I want to thank the readers of this blog. To those people who subscribe to the mailing list, and those who subscribe to the RSS feed, to those who have the site bookmarked and to those who just randomly stumble across the site – I hope in each case you’re finding something useful, and I’m grateful for your readership.

Happy holidays to those of you celebrating or relaxing over the coming weeks, and peaceful times to those working through.