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What constitutes a successful backup?
Introduction A seemingly straight-forward question, what constitutes a successful backup may not engender the same response from everyone you ask. On the surface, you might suggest the answer is simply...
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Architecture Matters: Protection in the Cloud (Part 1)
I’m going to keep this one short and sweet. In Cloud Boost vs Cloud Tier I go through a few examples of where and when you might consider using Cloud Boost instead of Cloud Tier. One interesting thing...
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Architecture Matters: Protection in the Cloud (Part 2)
(Part 1). Particularly when we think of IaaS style workloads in the Cloud, there’s two key approaches that can be used for data protection. The first is snapshots. Snapshots fulfil part of a data...
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Would you buy a dangerbase?
Databases. They’re expensive, aren’t they? What if I sold you a Dangerbase instead? What’s a dangerbase!? I’m glad you asked. A dangerbase is functionally almost exactly the same as a database, except...
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Using ItemPoint Table Level Recovery with SQL Server
NetWorker 9 modules for SQL, Exchange and Sharepoint now make use of ItemPoint to support granular recovery. ItemPoint leverages NetWorker’s ability to live-mount a database or application backup from...
View ArticleBasics – File level recovery from Image Level Backup
I want to try something different with this post. Rather than the usual post with screen shots and descriptions, I wanted instead to do a demo video showing just how easy it is to do file level...
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Basics – Using the vSphere Plugin to Add Clients for Backup
It’s a rapidly changing trend – businesses increasingly want the various Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) running applications and essential services to be involved in the data protection process. In...
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NetWorker 9.2 – A Focused Release
NetWorker 9.2 has just been released. Now, normally I pride myself for having kicked the tyres on a new release for weeks before it’s come out via the beta programmes, but unfortunately my June, June...
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NetWorker 9.2 Capacity Measurement
As I’ve mentioned in the past, there’s a few different licensing models for NetWorker, but capacity licensing (e.g., 100 TB front end backup size) gives considerable flexibility, effectively enabling...
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Basics – Running Workflows Manually
It may be something to do with my long Unix background, or maybe it’s because my first system administration job saw me administer systems over insanely low link speeds, but I’m a big fan of being able...
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Talking about Ransomware
The “Wannacry” Ransomware strike saw a particularly large number of systems infected and garnered a great deal of media attention. As you’d expect, many companies discussed ransomware and their...
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Basics – Understanding NetWorker Dependency Tracking
Dependency tracking is an absolutely essential feature within a backup product. It’s there to ensure you can recover data through the entire specified retention period for your backups, regardless of...
View ArticleBirthday give-away competition
Towards the end of September each year, I get to celebrate another solar peregrination, and this year I’m celebrating it with my blog readers, too. Here’s how it works: I’ve now been blogging about...
View ArticleBasics – device `X’ is marked as suspect
So I got myself into a bit of a kerfuffle today when I was doing some reboots in my home lab. When one of my DDVE systems came back up and I attempted to re-mount the volume hosted on that Data Domain...
View ArticleHypervisor Direct – Convergent Data Protection
At VMworld, DellEMC announced a new backup technology for virtual machines called Hypervisor Direct, which represents a paradigm that I’d refer to as “convergent data protection”, since it mixes layers...
View ArticleNetWorker Success Stories
Last month I ran a birthday giveaway competition – tell me a NetWorker success story, and go in the running for a signed copy of my book, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability. Since then, it’s...
View ArticleWhat’s up, doc?
If you’re a long term NetWorker user, you might be forgiven for focusing on just a few specific aspects of documentation whenever there’s a new release of the product. Usually, most people focus on the...
View ArticleBasics – NMC VMware Viewer
As you might have noticed in other posts, I’m a big fan of using NVP (NetWorker Virtual Proxy – also referred to as vProxy) to backup VMware virtual machines. Introduced with NetWorker 9.2, the new...
View ArticleWhat’s new in NetWorker 9.2.1?
NetWorker 9.2.1 has just been released, and the engineering and product management teams have delivered a great collection of features, in addition to the usual roll-up of prior cumulative patch...
View ArticleNetWorker 2017 Usage Survey
It seems like only a few weeks ago, 2017 was starting. But here we are again, and it’s time for another NetWorker usage survey. If you’re a recent blog subscriber, you may not have seen previous...
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