{"id":5607,"date":"2015-06-30T05:31:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T19:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5607"},"modified":"2015-06-30T05:31:21","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T19:31:21","slug":"celebrating-25-years-of-networker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2015\/06\/30\/celebrating-25-years-of-networker\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating 25 years of NetWorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Celebrations\"<\/a><\/p>\n

25 years ago, a post was made onto Usenet to announce the immediate availability of a new backup product called\u00a0NetWorker<\/em>. Thanks to Google’s archive of Usenet, you can still read the original post here<\/a>. There’s a lot of delightful snippets in there and I really recommend anyone interested in the history of NetWorker to take a few minutes out to read it. What perhaps caught my eye most was this\u00a0very<\/em> future-looking\u00a0line in the introduction:<\/p>\n

And as your network and volume of files expands, NetWorker has the capacity and performance to handle the load.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it’s fair to say that with it now being 25 years old, NetWorker has lived up to that claim. More than that, of course – the product did what it promised and is still going strong today, having been under EMC’s stewardship for the last 11 or 12 years. NetWorker was designed from\u00a0the ground up to be expandable, reliable, fast\u00a0and \u2013 just as importantly \u2013 a\u00a0framework<\/em>. This to me is where NetWorker has stood out over the years. It’s easy to\u00a0create a widget that has everything you\u00a0think<\/em> a customer might need. The smarter business though creates a widget that has a\u00a0lot<\/em> of what a customer might need and is\u00a0extensible<\/em>\u00a0so the customer can increase its usefulness to their own organisation.<\/p>\n

Remember that old adage …\u00a0don’t skate to\u00a0the puck: skate to where the puck is\u00a0going<\/em>.\u00a0Framework based products are built on that premise.<\/p>\n

\"dat<\/a><\/p>\n

The photo above is a bit of a walk down memory lane.\u00a0There was a time for me when DAT tapes ruled my working life. They were the core technology we used for backups at my first employer, and\u00a0it’s sitting on a deconstructed 500MB drive that had been the first index disk for the first backup server I administered. As you can imagine based on that photo, the index disk failed. That taught me the virtue\u00a0of having data protection for your data protection (and just how hard it was to fight for a pair of 2GB drives for index mirrors back in the mid-late 90s).<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, the first backup server I administered was even called\u00a0mars<\/em>.\u00a0If you’ve ever looked at\u00a0a NetWorker man page, you’ll understand the humour. Here’s an excerpt for instance from\u00a0the mminfo<\/em> man page:<\/p>\n

\"man<\/a><\/p>\n

NetWorker was the first enterprise backup\u00a0product I ever used, and I started my long history with it in 1996. I joined a Unix system administration\u00a0team and was told something along\u00a0the lines of:<\/p>\n

We just installed\u00a0this new backup product.\u00a0You can administer it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think a lot of backup administrators started that way \u2013\u00a0particularly back then. Backup was something given to the junior administrator.\u00a0It was the\u00a0start of a very long relationship with NetWorker, but I can also look back at it now and say\u00a0that it was operationally wrong to give\u00a0backups to the most\u00a0junior person in the group. There’s nothing wrong with juniors being involved in backups, but to be in\u00a0charge of their overall operation and configuration? That should be a\u00a0senior administrator.<\/p>\n

These days we’ve certainly seen that data protection attitudes have (for the most part) shifted. Now given\u00a0the\u00a0volume and variation of data encountered by an average business,\u00a0the people most equipped to make decisions around\u00a0backup\/recovery (and all other aspects of data protection) are\u00a0the senior technical experts in\u00a0the business. To overload an EMC term, I’ve constantly referred to these people over the\u00a0last few years as the\u00a0Data Protection Advocates<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My initial stint as a Unix system administrator had me\u00a0configuring and operating a variety of NetWorker\u00a0environments\u00a0across a diverse number of locations in Australia. In addition to my main NetWorker sites in Newcastle, NSW, I\u00a0had datazones in Sydney, Perth, and far north Queensland, just to name a few areas. Some of those environments were somewhat inimical to technology. One site in far\u00a0north Queensland for instance would have to get\u00a0their DLT jukeboxes swapped out every 6-9 months, and would have to air-blast them before sending them\u00a0back.<\/p>\n

A computer\u00a0room is just somewhere with less than a\u00a0centimetre of coal dust in it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was in those early days that I became a strong user of the\u00a0NetWorker command line, simply because the network connections between my office and those remote sites were minimal at best. Running a GUI over those links was practically impossible, so I learnt everything from\u00a0mminfo to nsradmin and manual recovery via a uasm stream from a partially failed tape.<\/p>\n

My first NetWorker server was a Sun system, and it was running Networker 4.1. (Or under a rebadging agreement: Solstice Backup.) We had some v3.x clients \u2013 we even had some AT&T Unix boxes\u00a0getting backed up via NFS mounts. So while I’ve not used NetWorker since the very start, I remember the excitement of ‘new fangled’ things such as\u00a0storage nodes<\/em> and\u00a0file type devices<\/em>. Not<\/strong>\u00a0advanced<\/em> file type devices,\u00a0file<\/em> type devices.\u00a0I saw the switches in resource database formats (specifically moving from nsr.res to nsrdb), the changes in media database and index formats,\u00a0more modules, consolidation in operating systems as the operating systems themselves came and went, and through it all: successful recoveries.<\/p>\n

At the end\u00a0of the day, that’s what NetWorker is all about: being able to\u00a0recover <\/em>the data when we need to, and that’s what NetWorker did. There’s no doubt in my mind \u2013 I’m aware of\u00a0some of them myself, including some very large businesses, but I\u00a0won’t name names \u2013 there are many\u00a0businesses operating today who owe their continued operation to NetWorker facilitating an urgent, mission critical recovery when the chips were down.<\/p>\n

But it’s not just me who is celebrating NetWorker being around for 25 years. There’s some great official EMC resources<\/a> available with stories from\u00a0other long-term users<\/a>, examples of prior marketing material and install kits, and an\u00a0infographic<\/a> on how far things have come.\u00a0Take a few minutes out of your\u00a0schedule and check them out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25 years ago, a post was made onto Usenet to announce the immediate availability of a new backup product called\u00a0NetWorker.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[1235],"class_list":["post-5607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","tag-history"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1sr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5607"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5613,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions\/5613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}