Slashdot Mirror

"Fifty percent of IT executives say their data centers are understaffed, and companies are still looking for more ways to cut costs, according to Symantec's latest 'State of the Data Center' report.

Gee, you'd almost think Symantec sold software for data center management...oh wait, they do.

Here's a response from 2005 that was NOT cut and pasted:

The original URL was https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=103&message.id=17080, but they removed it. However, Google cache reveals all:

(Post from was Bob Sanford)

Attached is the final email received from the Backline Support Engineer from Symantec. For all interested in purchasing this product... think twice.

Our problem was scheduled reports fail and no email attachment is generated.

The software performs correctly in demo mode but does not work once we enter the serial number.

I guess buyer beware!

Here is the message:

Chris / Bob,

I left voicemail for each of you explaining the present status of this case?s issues. This email will give further details. The first issue where scheduled report jobs could not be run with SBS licensing will be addressed in an upcoming HotFix. I do not know the exact release date of the HotFix. The Second issue regarding Report Job email notification not attaching a report when configured will not be addressed at this time. This was looked at by engineering and was determined to be in a different area of code from the scheduled job issue and since yours is the only case we have received related to this particular issue, the priority is not sufficient for developing an immediate patch. Since this case was opened through Dell, I have notified our internal Dell representative about the issue and status. From a Tech Support, we have done all we can do. Bob, since this issue is obviously of great importance to you, I would recommend working through Dell to engage engineering or sales to raise the priority / visibility of this issue. If you have any questions, please let me know. The link below is for the TechNote released to cover the issue:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/281743

Regards,

Russ Perry

Backline Support Engineer

Symantec Corporation

www.symantec.com

Office: 407-357-7237

russell_perry@symantec.com

(Here what I was about to post, but you pretty much summed up my viewpoint. Before all, here is a direct link to this Symantec Internet Security Threat Report -- Volume X: September 2006 that is talked about.)

It turns out that Firefox leads the pack with 47 vulnerabilities, compared to 38 for Internet Explorer.

Totally. Pointless. Comparison.

First, as the Slashdot posting correctly points out, the window of vulnerability is much larger with IE. Microsoft is known for taking months to fix some vulns, and is taking longer and longer over the years.

Second, what about the importance of these vulns ? Was it 47 minor DoS for Firefox and 38 critical arbitrary code execution vulns for IE ?

Third, what about the methodology used to gather the vuln counts ? The report always says "Source: Symantec Corporation", with no more information. Did they count Firefox security related bugs or security advisories ? Did they count 1 Microsoft patch fixing N vulns as 1 or N vulns (too many studies make this mistake) ?

Fourth, what about silently fixed vulns in IE ? Microsoft is known for secretly fixing vulns that are discovered internally, and of course they never talk about them in public. Symantec certainly did not count these.

There are just too many reasons making virtually all studies comparing the number of security patches between 2 products useless. This one is no exception.

This is pretty much the only real sofware: Symantec (formerly Veritas) NetBackup Enterprise Server 6 Hardware: Recommend a StorageTek L80 with whatever drives you see fit. And of course a server to match.. recommend Sun Solaris. If you want, I'll set it up for ya :)

I'm not in IT here (sorry), so I can't speak to the costs or backend ease of use, but as a frontend user, it is extremely seamless. Emails are moved to a "vault" (presumably some sort of compressed storage) according to rules (x days old, etc.), processed in the background. Full text searching still works, and the email still "appears" in Outlook (i.e., you can see to, from, subject, etc.). Opening an email takes a second or two to uncompress. Our IT has set no limit on the amount of email that can be archived into this system, and unless you're getting a LOT of huge emails, it is now very difficult to hit 2GB, because everything gets archived to the vault before you do.

http://www.veritas.com/kvs/

Have you considered another approach? Software such as Symantec Enterprise Vault (http://www.veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&ref Id=322) specialises in archiving email from exchange. It removes old or rarely used emails from Exchange and archives them to some NAS or other backup locations. In place of the messages it leaves shortcuts. With the help of a client a plug-in, the end user is none-the-wiser and thinks that all their emails are in their mailbox. You can access archived messages just as you would normal ones, but with a slightly longer delay.

Sure, this is probably a shameless plug, and yes, I did work on this software back in the days before Veritas ate KVS Ltd and Veritas merged with Symantec merged. However, there are other similar products about and I think this is an approach worth considering, be it with this particular product or not.

Most companies have users with bloated mailboxes and we found that many of our clients *couldn't* delete old messages for legal reasons. Normally, users are forced to archive messages to .PST files, but then you're left with the problem of archiving those too, plus they aren't terribly accessible. At least with something like Enterprise Vault you can make it appear that all the messages are still on the server and manage the archiving at the server directly, giving you control over how much actual running capacity the mailboxes require.

Veritas BackupExec can restore single mailboxes and even single messages.
http://veritas.com/Products/www?c=option&refId=79& productId=57

Of course you need to buy the Exchange component that backs up based on mailboxes and not on physical files.

http://www.veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&refI d=322

Here are 2 archiving solutions. I work for a law firm and lawyers use Outlook for storage. We currently have a 350 MB size limit but quite a few partners exceed that and there's not a whole lot we can do to prevent that other than remind them with and email stating their mailbox is over the limit.

These 2 can move email and attachments to cheaper storage and the user doesn't know it's been moved, other than the icon next to the message. They click on the email and it opens. This eliminates .pst files. I'm sure there's other solutions out there.

Veritas' KVS

EMC's Lagato

May I introduce you to a product known as Veritas Volume Manager?

Now *that* is what volume management is all about. I agree, SVM is a piece of junk, but that's why we have VxVM ....

Now, I have to take issue with what you're saying about Sun hardware -- it's a lot EASIER to maintain than any generic x86 box I've ever seen.

You don't understand just how cool it is until you start dynamically replacing system boards -- and you can do that in any server from the 2900 on up ....

It's all about availability -- and none of the x86 vendors (Sun's x86 stuff included) can touch that ...

In the past, our management splurged and bought a Network Appliance. Two, actually; we have an F880 and an F740. The 740 is pretty much defunct right now; it's only got about 300GB of disk and we use it to house static application installs. The 880 is more robust and therefore more efficiently used, but only has 2.2TB of (insanely reliable) disk. Disk that costs about $20,000 per additional TB.

Last year, we learned that Xyratex (the company that makes the disk shelves for NetApp) has started selling SATA-based disk arrays. Right now, I believe they only support 400GB SATA drives in a 16-drive chassis, but support for 500GB drives is supposedly right around the corner. A fully-populated chassis with 400GB drives will yield about 4.8TB of usable space. We have purchased five head units (about $20,000 full of disk) and one shelf (about $15,000 full of disk). Each unit is expandable to 7 shelves (including the head), which yields over 32TB of usable disk. I don't know what your budget is, but $110,000 is pretty reasonable for over 32TB. Admittedly, you could buy 32 stripped-down Dell Dimension 4700's (to get SATA) with two 500GB hard drives; install a slim OS and you could get approximately the same amount of usable space. But the reliability of the Xyratex has been far greater than the reliability of the Dell machines we've purchased in recent years.

It's ironic that you brought up the NeoPath File Director. We're going through the trials and tribulations of installing a clustered pair of them right now. We've had some difficulty in getting them set up, but it seems like they'll do the trick when we get them going. The MSRP on the cluster is kind of high, but talk to their sales guys if you're interested - we got almost 1/3 off the listed price. We plan on using the File Director to migrate old files from the NetApps to our Xyratex, thereby expanding our storage at $3,300 per TB instead of $20,000 per TB. I can see it working well, though, for aggregating a large number of file servers into a single virtual server.

I don't know how the File Director will interface with your operating systems. We use Veritas's Storage Foundation (~$500 per license - you should only need one) on our systems because we're primarily limited to Windows and Solaris, which have difficulty with large filesystems. Storage Foundation breaks the size limitations as well as enabling easier management of your volumes.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

What about the Veritas file system http://www.veritas.com/Products/www?c=subcategory& refId=109&categoryId=120

Try:
Legato from EMC (http://www.legato.com/)
CommVault (http://www.commvault.com/)
KVS (which is now part of Veritas, http://www.veritas.com/kvs/)

We have looked at all of these for the past few months and all of these are Sarbanes-Oxley compliant.

this? Veritas provides a CLI to all their other products, I'd be terribly surprised if this was an exception.

VCFS (Veritas Clustered File System)
http://veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&refId=20 9
VCFS (Virtual CVS File System)
http://vcfs.sourceforge.net/

"As one could suspect, RAID 1 offers very little in terms of performance."

You took this single quote VASTLY out of context to start with. It is refering to RAID-1 verses RAID-0 and/or single drives. It is NOT refering to RAID-1 relative to RAID-5. It's a mile-high look at RAID.

Let's try some other quotes from that same article, which aren't out-of-context like the ones you provided:

Although not the slowest of the common RAID types, RAID 1 can be slower than a single drive in some cases

Not all is good with RAID 5, however. Due to the parity bit that must be calculated and written to on each drive, there is overhead.

But with the rather noticeable performance hit that RAID 5 incurs, this RAID type is best left for servers with critical data but not much need for speed.

And once again, the more you try to prove yourself right, the more you prove yourself wrong. On that VERY SAME ARTICLE they benchmarked RAID 0/1/5 and guess what??? RAID-1 was consistently faster than RAID-5 in their own benchmarks.

My claim is true and verifiable. AnandTech is a reputable website. If I recall correctly, you didn't seem to agree with this, yet you didn't back up *your* claim.

There yo go, your claim is CLEARLY false based on your own sources. Since you are the one who quoted Anandtech and said how great they are, surely you won't argue with them. And now, I have backed-up my claim with YOUR sources. I didn't bother to post any links before, because EVER SITE you could possibly visit that benchmarked a RAID-5 setup will show the SAME THING. You're the one arguing that you're right, and the rest of the world is wrong.

Will they increase the power consumption of the box?

By such a small ammount that it would be trite and banal to mention it for no particular reason.

Compared to your suggestion of using a 120mm rear and 80mm front fan, 3 80mm fans would use LESS power.

You can have a quiet PC while still maintaining proper cooling (as opposed to running a PC without any fans, as you suggest).

Yes, but just using fewer fans doesn't accomplish this, which is specifically what you implied.

A quick search on google for "cause of disk failure" reveals that heat is practically never* a cause in a drive's death,

Once again, you want me to do a google search that proves you wrong. If you had even read the SUMMARIES of the results returned on the first page, you would have seen that much. A select few quotes:

Hot spots are a very common cause of disk failure.
http://eval.veritas.com/downloads/pro/biz_value_of _vol_mgmt.pdf


Excessive heat is the #1 cause of disk failure
http://www.inostor.com/support/InoStor_NAS_Quick_I nstallation_Guide51.pdf

one could intelligently conclude that it's not the operating temperature that is an issue (as long as it's operating within spec), it's the change in temperature that matters.

No, one could not intelligently conclude that... Your method of logic is to jump around an issue in nonsensical ways, until you get an answer that is vague and meaningless.

Having any number of fans pointed at your hard drives is not going to exaggerate their extreme tempuratures, but only keep down their maximum tempurature, closer to ambient. Having less cooling that just happens to provide consistent direction is not going to make the hard drive tempuratures fluctuate any less.

Can you say "No, the inside of the disk does not need to be cooled"?

I was curious, so I checked.

They actually don't support SuSE as a server, and they stopped support for free RH versions at 7.3 (I assume this is when the first version of RHEL came out). The chart says they don't support RHEL 3.0, as a server, but I know someone who is running it on 3.0, and claims they support him.

No BSD's are supported as a server.

Veritas does more than backup as well.

No, sorry, software RAID is a beautiful thing, at least for boot disk mirroring.

At least these guys think so.

All the big players are buying into this. For the Google-challenged:

EMC's take from todays Cnet
CA
HP
IBM(tho' they prefer the acronym HSM or Hierarchical Storage Management)
Veritas
Random googled pundit on the entire field.

I use WinInstall LE for this purpose. It is included on the Windows 2000 Server CD and can also be downloaded from here... It is used primarily to repackage an application install as a MSI file, but it produces a text file that shows all file system and registry changes between the before and after snapshots.

Backup Exec DOES have its own domain-wide service account, which has Backup Operator rights on everything it needs to get to. Yet for some inexplicable reason it still needed anonymous access. See here or here for details.

And for the record, this discussion was about NULL-sessions and has nothing to do with the guest account (which is DISABLED on everything we use).

Backup Exec DOES have its own domain-wide service account, which has Backup Operator rights on everything it needs to get to. Yet for some inexplicable reason it still needed anonymous access. See here or here for details.

And for the record, this discussion was about NULL-sessions and has nothing to do with the guest account (which is DISABLED on everything we use).

One really nice feature is incremental snapshots of an OS.

And for the Linux geeks amongst us, the x86 software that does the management and image snapping/provisioning, is a very stripped down version of Linux. it's a tiny bit more clever than dd commands ;-)

Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.


Ever stopped to consider how much money is in this segment? How important it is to have a backup solution which is secure, scalable and trustable in a million bussiness?

The fact that Veritas bought up the backup part of Seagate's software and that they have strong ties with Windows doesn't mean that they are up to some "sly" stuff... As a matter of fact, i couldn't think of anything for that matter.

They see an emerging market, Linux, which is needing strong products to back it up in corporate userland. Any company would immediately jump to it.

It's not as if they never supported any other kind of OS. They have supported (and still do) Novell Netware next to Windows. Their agents are available for different Unix versions (including Linux for some time now, databases (oracle and SQL server), messaging systems (Exchange and Lotus Notes) and many other corporate tools. Many of which compete directly with MS software. Oh.. by the way, they also boast the fact that they surpassed Microsoft in supplying clustering and availability products. Not something you would expect from a MS serf would you?

Favorite... You must mean Veritas, since /.'ers are irony impaired.

You could check commerical software such as Veritas' new Storage Reporter(formerly Precision Software's product).

Should be available for Linux among other OSes.

Obligatory disclaimer: I have no connection to veritas other thanusing their stuff.

Please do my job for me. Plz k thx bye.

HP 8 * 200Gb Ultrium Autoloader

Veritas Backup software.

Just make sure you buy the library options and remote backup agent licences too.

What I did, since Amanda doesn't have very good robotic library support, was to set up our NT server with an old version of Backup Exec (it was available used, from another company that upgraded, and it was cheap). Then I added a surplus Exabyte 8mm library (an EXB210, if I recall correctly) that I got for about $50 at the local used computer place.

Next, I installed Samba on our NetBSD boxes, set up the shares and permissions, and viola! Centralized backup with minimal hassle and cost.

Granted, this was done with older software and surplus components. While the exact hardware, and specific backup software I used may not be suitable for "enterprise" environments, the same principle applies. Samba is a lot more useful than I think some folks give it credit for. Thank you, Andrew Tridgell!

The problem with most suggestions here is that it seems the average slashdot reader is a linux hobbyist or works as the IT manager for a small office that happens to run linux. What happens when you need to backup 6TB/night and don't want to pay someone to sit around swapping tapes all night. Sometimes it just isn't practical to purchase another SAN solution to facilitate an rsync. Or what if you have a collection of high capacity LTO tape drives at your disposal, but don't have the budget for something larger and automated, or smaller with an autoloader. I think automation and efficiency is almost as important as reliability and cost. Not everyone can afford a Storagetek Powderhorn Silo, or needs the versatility of expensive products such as Veritas Netbackup. Then again, sometimes tar or rsync just don't cut it in an enterprise environment where data is mission critical.

MyCD is a software package that Veritas produces that OEM's out to CD-R/RW makers and brand as theirs. Pioneer bundles a version of MyDVD (the version I have is called something else but I can recall the name right now) with the DVD-R/RW drive that I bought and that they licensed from Veritas and re-laballed it as Pioneer's, though the Veritas logo is still floating around the app.

I just scoreda sweet 1 1/2 year internship with veritas and a good friend of mine just got a gig with a insurance company developing internal software. I guess the twin cities is the place to be to get paid.

Ok Anonymous, do your homework.

I'm migrating about 500 clients and 20 NT4 servers to 'mostly' linux and I run Veritas for backup and Sophos antivirus on my servers and clients.

Can't get more 'adequate' then that friend.
The revolution has begun ;)

VERITAS VM is available for Linux now. (Although Slackware isn't listed as supported.)

The web GUI inside Veritas Cluster Server (Veritas' high-availability manager) is Tomcat with a wrapper around it. Plenty of people are using this software in production.

So, you will probably have to buy hardware and software to automate backups if you want any real protection. Fortunately, the hardware for most backups is a comodity in that you can easily compare size/speed/reliability/cost stats to determine which is right for you. The backup software is a much more confusing decision because there are many products with features that make each backup product unique.

In selecting the software, it is probably best to start by looking at the products produced by the leading backup software vendor, VERITAS Software. Before you know what features you want, you need to see what features are available. Once you figure out which VERITAS product best fits your needs, you can look at competitors and compare features, support, and price. Here is how I think VERITAS markets its products:

• VERITAS NetBackup - Large networked environments (i.e., 100 - 1,000,000+ computers, mixed OS (unix/mac/pc/ndmp). It does nearly everything you could want, but you pay for it.
• VERITAS BackupExec - Small environments (i.e., 1-500 computers), mostly windows. Will handle most companies quite nicely and you can buy it off the shelf. There are other products that automate backups on individual computers. BackupExec can solve this need, but when you don't need all extra features, why pay for it?
• VERITAS NetBackup Professional - satellite environments where computers are not permanently connected and networks are slow (i.e., laptops the dial up).

That said, I actually just back up all my important data to another hard drive at home. It's risky, but at most I just lose email and pictures of my vacations. At work, though, it's NetBackup.

Backups are automated, users can restore their own files (if you choose to let them) and it will do bare metal disaster recovery.

More info www.veritas.com

[I have no connection with Veritas other than as a happy customer]

It's a small office of around 30 users...

I am the IT person for the office...and what I found out that works best is Veritas Backup Exec...

It works great...

Being a sysadmin who always gets stuck specializing in backups, I recommend the following solution for a (relatively) low budget backup solution on Windows. Please note that this system ignores trying to get the users to do this themselves, because users will never do anything right.

1- Get all users off of Windows 98 and onto Windows 2000. Do NOT go to Windows XP. Having all your systems on one OS will make troubleshooting backup (Among others.) problems much easier, and having the systems on a better OS will help ensure that backups actually run right.

2- Get all of the systems on a Windows 2000 domain on which they have NO administrative privileges. This keeps users from screwing around with backup software and options.

3- Buy Veritas Backup Exec as well as the open file option (~$900 USD).Read the manual before you use it. If the company to spring for training, get trained. Set it up a server that won't mind the extra load.

You may notice that other companies sell other backup solutions. In a Windows environment, stick with Veritas. Veritas wrote the backup software built into Windows. Veritas works with Microsoft to make their product work well with Windows. Veritas also has what is, IMHO, some of the best software support out there.

4- First thing every morning, grab a cup of coffe and go through last night's backup logs. Keep a written journal of all failures and irregularities (A nice spreadsheet is userful as well.). This will help track errors.

5- Do test restores often! You don't want to do all this and find out that you cannot restore data properly!

6- Store backup tapes off site! Find out if Iron Mountain has a facility nearby and if so, USE IT. 99% (Yes, 99%!) of all lost data is caused by fires. Earthquakes and floods are not far behind. Nothing will wipe out a small site like a big fire that takes backup tapes with it.

7- Put together a good disaster recovery plan and try it out on test machines once a year or so. Aside from keeping you ready for a disaster (Imagine if you had been a sysadmin in the World Trade center, survived the disaster, kept fine backups off-site, but had no idea how to bring the systems back up from nothing but tapes!), it will keep you ready for small disasters (ie your domain controller's raid array croaks and corrupts all the disks on the way to the graveyard.) as well.

Hope this helps. And remember, most importantly - users are stupid assholes. The reason you get paid to dick around with computers all day is because users are stupid assholes, and can't use a computer without fucking things up. Making them backing up data is not your job; backing it up no matter what they think is!

But to anwser you, since you apparently dont know anything, http://veritas.com/. But most importantly get a LART. And a goddamm clue.

If you're predominately running Windows 98 and 2000, I recommend upgrading everyone to 2000 if at all possible. Then you can use NT Backup to write selected data to a server. It may not be the best solution in the world, but it's cheap since NT Backup comes with Win2k.

Then if you're concerned about backing up the server, you can buy a single tape drive and perform a bakup of the server; you'll get everything at once. If you need a server with more hard disk space, my company has been buying completely customized kits from California PC Products. We just put together a dual Athlon 1.9GHz w/ 1.5Gb RAM and 1.5Tb storage space (RAID 5) for about $6,000. Running Linux with Samba shares will cut the cost even more, and will also speed up data transfer rates.

If that doesn't sound like a viable option, look into Veritas backup solutions. We've been successful using their product, but it is more costly.

Much of your decision will probably come down to exactly what you need backed up and what you can afford. Good luck!

I used to work at VERITAS Software. They routinely delayed release dates on products if quality wasn't good enough.

There is a problem with this, though. Customers made business plans based upon planned release dates. When those release dates slipped, the customer's plans were upset. This could leave them in awkward situations because they couldn't do certain things without features present in newer versions of the software. As a consequence, we always dreaded a slipping of the release date because it would provoke great annoyance from the customers.

Customers want it right and on-time. If they have to pick between those two, they will select to have it right, but will not be happy about it!

You mean like this one?

Ahem. I assume you mean VxVM (which is what does the partitioning). And since you ask, there are three things that do that on Linux: LVM, EVMS, and yes, genuine Veritas VxVM (and also VxFS thrown in, to boot). Solaris may be better at some things than Linux, but the number of things that fall in that category is shrinking rapidly. Volume management no longer qualifies.

Besides, it sounds like you're facing a grown-up problem. Why not use a grown-up filesystem and/or a grown-up operating system?

Of course, Veritas have their own FlashSnap product that does this for VxFS filesystems, and have just released it for Linux. It's a relatively pricey option, but it works well, and if you need this sort of functionality, the price is negligible.

Hardware is fine and dandy, but have you ever tried to find the right drivers for a Turing Machine? ArcServe and Veritas drivers only support a few hundred gigabytes of tape.

You'd think after 60 years someone could have at least invented a Turing Autoloader.

Since you did not state a retrieval time or storage/retention needs, I am going to offer to scenarios; one for long term, fast access storage, one for short term and/or slow access storage.

Storing 8TB/day for a long time with quick access would probably require a tape silo, which is essentially a tape library the size of a small house. StorageTek is one of the leaders in silos (And might be the only vendor making them these days.), and they make some pretty nice stuff. Their PowderHorn 9310 is a nice model for bulk storage and quick recovery. A downside to the silos is that they do not often handle DLT tapes, which can make it hard to use tapes outside of the library.

If you do not need fast access to the data, and have time to root through tapes for restores, just get a smaller tape library (Anything in the 50-100 tape range from ATL/Quantum Adic or Qualtstar running SuperDLT drives controlled by Veritas Netbackup would give you an easy way to handle all the data. NetBackup has excellent archiving capabilites (IE record data, wipe data from disk.), works on just about any platform out there, scales well, and keeps files in GNUTar format for easy access. As for storing the tapes themselves, if you have a small retention time just keep around a few hundred tapes to cycle through. If you need to store the data for a long time, get a few thousand tapes and a set of nice shelves to keep them on. If you do not have somewhere to store them, Iron Mountain does a great job storing data, I have worked with them before and toured one of their facilities, and I can vouch that they do a great job storing data.