How about some of these:
1) A much cleaner way of recovering a NW server? Had to do a mmrecov this week
for a special situation and even with the awesome support person we had to do a
bunch undocumented cleanup (e.g. address the fact the recovered server stalled
while it attempted to do DNS lookups for all the clients). Added about 3.5
hours to the process. What's especially frustrating is that all of the data
for a NW server are sitting in the installation directory as easily
accessible/copyable files. Why can't we replicate/copy that data to the DR
server/new server and have some tool at the perform all of the cleanup? Take
the interface from the Procedure Generator and go from there. No one expects
to be able to do that for Windows -> *nix conversion, but how about Prod -> DR,
or Windows 2003 -> Windows 2008? Put restrictions on who gets the tool that
does the automated cleanup...timeouts or call homes or something...but that
would by a huge improvement in usability/resiliency.
2) Clones jobs that can utilize multiple tape drives/disk targets instead of a
serial stream. We backup to multiple devices, why can't we clone to multiple
devices? End up having to size the environment to deal with the copy job or
come up with weird work-arounds. I want to specify available drives via media
pool restrictions or the like, and then pass a set of SSIDs to the new
nsrclone, which then will intelligently use all of the available targets.
3) A much simpler maintenance/licensing plan. There's been improvement in this
over the last few years, but it is still much too awkward. I spend days each
year looking at the line items and trying to translate them into English.
Legacy style licenses that don't go away. Valid enablers in use that don't
show up in the licensing section of Powerlink. How about some way to dump the
configuration in a fashion that could be sent to EMC for true-up? A planning
tool would be nice too. I've heard about the capacity-based license option,
but every time the topic comes up my sales and tc contacts start their
sentences with "Well..........you see........"
4) nsradmin output improvements. Why is it in my (Windows) world, I have to
create a text file with instructions so that I can capture nsradmin output to a
text file? It's 2012 fer cryin out loud. Why is it, if I want to generate a
simple query to use with another script, such as one that lists the active
clients, I have to create the aforementioned instructions file for nsradmin,
and then parse/cleanup the output with something like powershell (and I assume
awk/perl for my *nix brethren) so that there is not a lot of extraneous
characters or odd spacing? The command-line tools are a strength of the
product, but please make it easier for me to use the output, ok?
5) Powershell cmdlets to report/manage the environment. There, I said it, I
won't hold my breath.
6) Every IT consultant on the planet preaches (rightly so) that IT needs to
align with the business. Ok, help me do that. How about plagiarizing the
concept of "Host Profiles" from VMware? Configure client X as needed, maybe
several client entries with various settings. Allow me to then to capture that
complete config as a "profile". Let me edit the profile, say in a text or xml
file, to make it more generic. Then let me use this profile to check the
configuration of other servers for pass/fail. Let me remediate them by
applying the profile. Let me report against the status of my clients ("All
servers with Profile X have passed their configuration"). Let me report
against the type and number of profiles. Now I can prove to my customers and
any auditors that my stuff is configured correctly. And I can build RTOs/RPO's
based on my profiles. And I can write documentation/procedures on how to make
changes to my environment.
BTW, I'm scripting this (not the remediation part tho) if you want a demo.
7) First let me say to EMC that I love the new reports available in the NMC
for 7.6. Would you please make them a little more adjustable? You have
correctly captured the issues that I care about in the canned reports, such as
success/failure details, duration of each saveset's backup and start time,
number of files, etc. It would be really nice if I could get that info IN THE
SAME REPORT. If you can't do it in the GUI, that's cool, put it in the command
line.
Cheers!
--brerrabbit
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