Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] (no subject)

2002-11-21 10:41:53
Subject: [Veritas-bu] (no subject)
From: Quarantine AT GSCCCA DOT ORG (Quarantine)
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 10:41:53 -0500
I agree with Michael - don't.  :-)  There are a host of reasons why backing
up every machine in a company is a bad idea.  Of course, there's bound to be
a place where it's appropriate...

A few things to think about:

1.  Roaming users (laptops) and users shutting off their systems when they
go home at night.

2.  Are you going to have to back up across the WAN?  Unless you have fat
pipes, you'll probably have to put media servers and tape equipment at your
remote sites.

3.  Think about the size of the hard drives that come on computers these
days and the multitude of junk that people download/collect and keep on
their local drives.  You can start talking about a serious amount of data
very quickly.  Imagine a full backup of a couple of thousand computers, and
your costs are way over what you would need to back up centralized storage.

4.  How will this impact your LAN?

5.  Is your NBU server environment beefy enough to handle all these clients?
Can your master/media servers push the tapes to their limits?  Are your tape
drives fast enough?  Can you back up everybody (even if you split them up)
in a realistic backup window?

6.  I agree that offloading admin to the users is a good idea as far as your
workload is concerned, but do you really trust your users to be responsible
for backing up their data?  If data is lost and a user is responsible for
backups, you're probably still going to get blamed.  If you go that route,
you're going to have to push for a policy that makes the user responsible.
Even if you overcome that hurdle, if data is lost and not backed up, the
data is gone.  Even if you don't get blamed, you've still lost something
that could be very important to your business.

It's almost always cheaper and easier to buy a file server (or more than
one), load it up with lots of storage or hook it to your SAN, and force
users to use that.  Something along the line of home directories in NT works
well with this.  I guess there are some instances where this might not work,
but it should work most of the time.

Good luck,
Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Breshears [mailto:MBreshears AT trammellcrow DOT com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 10:22 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] (no subject)


What a can of worms :-)  You should get some interesting responses from this
question.  Here is my 2 cents:

DON'T (just kidding)

The 2 issues that immediately jump out at me are duplicate data and
administration.  I do not know the size of the company that we are talking
about so it is all relative.  If this is something your company has already
decided to do, I would suggest looking at NetBackup Professional and letting
the users take some of the administrative load off your shoulders.  

If they are allowed to save to their local drive, you will have multiple
copies of every document that they are working on, so cost of storage space
will be a major factor.

Good Luck!

Michael
mbreshears AT trammellcrow DOT com


-----Original Message-----
From: David Turner [mailto:Dturner AT manh DOT com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 8:38 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] (no subject)


I have a general question. How many people have to backup everyone's machine
in the entire company Servers, laptops, and Desktops. Can you tell what to
watch out for or why this is not a good idea.

Thx

David
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