Slides and Notes from the Indiana Storage & High Availability User Group Meeting - September 14, 2010

[Mark_Garringer]

Indiana Storage & High Availability User Group

Minutes from September 14, 2010

The sixth meeting of the Indiana Storage & High Availability User Group was held on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at Dave&Buster’s in Indianapolis, IN.  11 individuals attended, representing eight distinct organizations.  Symantec was represented by two local attendees.

The meeting began with lunch at 12:00 and was catered by Dave&Buster’s.  At 12:30, we got down to business, with group president Brian Doyle welcoming the group and highlighting the agenda for the session.

After proceeding around the room and having all attendees introduce themselves, Brian Doyle presented a description of how Sallie Mae uses Veritas Foundation Suite to provide highly-available Catalog Backups at their DR site.  Challenges that Sallie Mae faced include:

• a large NBU catalog
• recovery that takes longer than desired
• recovery that loses too much data

Sallie Mae’s solution was to use a clustered master server sharing a common data store for the catalog, and using array-based replication to propagate catalog changes to their DR site.  RTO was reduced from more than 48 hours to less than 2 hours.  NBU’s Real-time option is another possible solution, and is one which would reduce that RTO even further.

After a brief pause in the agenda, the meeting resumed at 1:45 with Rob Lindenbusch of Dewpoint discussing the use of Veritas CommandCentral for managing heterogeneous storage networks.  This product consists of four principal components:

• CommandCentral Storage Manager, which provides end-to-end views of provisioned storage, capacity management, and monitoring
• Reporter, which provides many different levels and views of the storage infrastructure, including the ability to produce custom reports
• Change Manager, which establishes baseline configurations and detects variations from that baseline
• DR advisor, which provides vulnerability detection, gap analysis, and automatic testing.

After Rob’s presentation, there was a brief discussion of attendance, specifically with a focus on how to keep attendance at the meetings at a high level.  After a drawing for Reward Points winners, the meeting concluded. 

The winners of the drawing were:

100- Dave Paulson

150- Joe Eversole

200- Mark Garringer

250- Josh Opper

300- Patrick Flick

Additionally, the following presenters also earned:

500 (Presenter)- Brian Doyle

500 (Presenter)- Rob Lindenbusch