Copy Data Management is not a Replacement for Backup
Copy Data Management (CDM) is a very hot topic in both the backup and recovery and storage management markets today. Technology startups are coming out of stealth mode, investors are funding new ventures, and established hardware and software vendors are entering the market.
Agile, End-to-end, Scalable Data Protection for Cisco UCS Based Data Centers with Symantec NetBackup
Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers unify computing, networking, management, virtualization, and storage access into a single integrated architecture. This unique architecture enables end-to-end server visibility, management, and control in both bare metal and virtual environments.Harnessing the power of VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection
Trucks move stuff. The engine burns fuel to generate power. Transmission system sends the power to the wheels. The trailer carrying the payload moves. Trucks consume a finite amount of time and energy to reach destination. We have learned in high school that engines and transmission systems have less than 100% efficiency. You are losing some of the generated power to heat and friction. Let us say you were given four of these big rig systems, all are identical with the exception of the transmission systems. Now you are measuring the time they take and fuel they burn to move a fixed amount of payload from one location to another. You repeat the experiments for different amounts of load. You plot the results to benchmark performance, efficiency and scale. Backup solutions integrating with VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) are similar to the transmission systems in trucks. The engine that really powers the backup process is the set of vStorage APIs. The goal of the backup solution is to harness its power to move data in virtual machines to secondary storage systems. Thus the virtual machines being backed up constitute the payload. As some of you already know, Veritas/Symantec had asked Principled Technologies to benchmark these transmission systems in harnessing the power of VADP. Here are the results. Remember that all trucks are equipped with the same engine (VADP). The load added (from 100 VMs to 1000VMs) for various tests are also the same. In accordance with the strict benchmarking standards, all the trucks were given a few runs to break-in so that the regular day-to-day operating conditions are evaluated. After the break-in runs, three benchmarking runs are conducted for each load. The median value for each truck for each loadis plotted above. Let us interpret the results. Performance The first thing that stands out from figure 1 is that the orange truck (NetBackup is represented in Orange. As this benchmarking started before the announcement of Veritas separation we used orange to represent NetBackup) is the fastest no matter how small or large the payloads are. And red truck (Competitor ‘C’) is the slowest! Even at the largest payload of 1000 VMs, NetBackup is 5.8x times faster than the slowest in the herd. The blue (Competitor ‘E’) and green (Competitor ‘V’) are weak when compared with the performance leader, NetBackup. However both are way better than the red truck. The bottom-line: If you are on blue or green trucks and run out of gas, do not hop onto to red truck! It is more like hopping on to an inefficient and slow steam wagon! Efficiency Now let us quickly gloss over figure 2. What you see is the CPU consumption at the data mover. In trucking terms, we are looking at how much gasoline is consumed for the trips and how much is still available in the reservoir if you had wanted to carry more loads. The orange truck (NetBackup) not only completed the trip much quicker but it also did the task with a lot of gasoline to spare. As you see can see we had to specifically draw attention to almost lost orange line in the resource utilization chart because of overwhelming gasoline consumption for pretty much all other trucks. The worst performer once again is the red truck. It is not just slow; it is also a gas-guzzler! There aren’t really any more resources to spare so you couldn’t have added more payload and hoped to finish the trip in the same time frame. The blue truck uses up nearly 85% of resources to for its trip. The greentruck starts somewhat well but the consumption shoots up during the final quarter. Scalability What exactly is scale in the context of this benchmark? The scalability is a measure of how well the product performs as the load it needs to handle increases. As you can see from figure 1, as you increase the load NetBackup continues to perform well ahead of the herd. But this data by itself only justifies that NetBackup is #1 in scale. Now let us move to figure 2. NetBackup data mover (media server) is using less than 50% of the gasoline while finishing the task in less than 1/5th of the time when compared to the worst performer. In other words, by the time the red truck moves 1000 VMs, NetBackup could have moved 10,000 VMs! That is 10x better scale! NetBackup is not only #1 in performance but it stays at that position while consuming the least resources thereby making more room for future demands. Thus NetBackup is indeed the king of scale. There is a lot more for us to share with you. How about scalability in recovery? How about storage integration? Will you be at VMworld San Francisco this year? Join George Winter and me at this session to learn more about the benchmark design, methodology, results and lessons learned. King of scale benchmark revealed in VMworld#STO5475
Datastore Utilization Alarm Trigger Test
I had an opportunity to conduct datastore utilization alarm test at 95 % utilization. The datastore criticl alarm was set to 95% and the free space was set to 10% before the customer implemented VMware snapshot based backups. The goal of the test was to identify the response times of respective teams starting from the time the datastore reached 95% and the actual time it takes the alarm trigger to reach the monitoring team and then the time it gets notified to VMware platform team to perform vMotion to overcome datastore out of space condition. Below are the steps performed and corresponding actual results. Test Steps and Expectations: 1. Datastore 95% alert alarms – Monitoring Team should receive the alarm 2. Ticket should be is escalated/raised with the Platform Team – performed by Monitoring Team 3. Platform Team should acknowledges the ticket – performed by VMware Platform Team Record Test Results: Capture how much time elapses for ticket to be raised with platform team Document the time each step is performed Identify any other groups that should be notified as a result of netbackup filling up the datastore full Actual Test Results: Total time elapsed from step 1 to 3 was 1 hr. This does not include the vMotion time to overcome the datastore out of space or full condition. It was noticed that clearly the 95% threshold and 10% free space was too narrow compared to the response times of respective teams. Thus it was concluded the free space should be at least 20 % and the alarm threshould should be set down to 85 % to avoid potential outage.Symantec e-Campus for Technical Product Training is free for all!
Functional IT professionals value technical training. Whether you are new to the industry and looking to start from the basics, someone who has experience in a competing solution and switching to Symantec solution or someone trying to evaluate a solution that is best suited for company business needs, a technical architect is comfortable to make an informed decision if he/she can actually get technical information easily. He/she may not be interested in a sales pitch; the appetite there is really for the true technical capabilities and operations. Unlike some vendors in the market who hide even product documentation unless you have already bought the product, Symantec had always made it available online. There is nothing to hide from the public when most products are already leaders in the market. Now, Symantec is taking this approach to the next level. How about making some of the technical training online? Better yet, how about making it free for all? If you didn’t know about this yet, take a moment to visit Symantec e-Campus As we are in Netting out NetBackup blog, let me give you some samples of what is in store for NetBackup 7.6 ▪New in NBU 7.6: Intro to NBU 7.6 (1 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: Accelerator for VMware (2 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: Instant Recovery for VMware (3 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: vCloud Director Integration (4 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: NBU Plug-in for vCenter (5 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: BMR Physical-to-Virtual Conversion (6 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: Miscellaneous VMware-related Enhancements (7 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Virtualization: Support for Hyper-V 2012 (8 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Replication Director: RD for VMware (9 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Replication Director: RD for VMWare – MS-Exchange (10 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Replication Director: RD for VMWare – MS-SQL Server (11 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Replication Director: RD VSS Changes and SAN Support (12 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Replication Director: RD Support for Oracle (13 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Policies and SLPs: Oracle Policy Improvements (14 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Policies and SLPs: SLP Windows and Other Enhancements (15 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Policies and SLPs: SLP Parameters (16 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Policies and SLPs: Targeted Auto Image Replication (17 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: OpsCenter: Improved User Experience (18 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: OpsCenter: Embedded Authentication Broker (19 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: OpsCenter: Integrated Active Director Groups (20 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: OpsCenter: Enhanced NBU and Appliance Awareness (21 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Deduplication: Media Server Deduplication Enhancements (22 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Supportability: Logging Assistant and Support Utility Enhancements (23 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Miscellaneous: Legal Search and Hold Enhancements (24 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Miscellaneous: NBU Catalog Improvements (25 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Miscellaneous: NDMP Wildcard Support (26 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Miscellaneous: Client-Direct Restores (27 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Platforms: MS-SQL 2012 Server Support (28 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Platforms: Windows 8 and Windows 2012 Server Support (29 of 30) ▪New in NBU 7.6: Platforms: Solaris 11 Support Enhancements (30 of 30) ▪Upgrading to NBU 7.6: Upgrading to NBU 7.6 – an Introduction (1 of 4) ▪Upgrading to NBU 7.6: Upgrading to NBU 7.6 (2 of 4) ▪Upgrading to NBU 7.6: Upgrading OpsCenter (3 of 4) ▪Upgrading to NBU 7.6: Upgrading NBU Search (4 of 4) Also there are blue prints available to assist you with everyday tasks ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for VMware (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Accelerator for VMware (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for VMware Instant Recovery (IRV) (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Accelerator (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for AIR (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Hyper-V (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Decommissioning NetBackup Appliance (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Oracle (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Replication Director (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for Exchange (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for SharePoint (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for SQL (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for configuring Appliance (Job Aid in PDF format) ▪NBU 7.6 Blueprint for SAN Client (Job Aid in PDF format) Enjoy! Don’t forget, the eCampus have training for many Symantec products and solutions.
