That brings up a good point.  I'd say that you should upgrade NetWorker
FIRST, as the new version of NW will almost certainly work on your old
hardware/OS, but the reverse is not necessarily true.  You could upgrade
your OS/hardware to something NW doesn't support until a later version,
and then you'd have to both at the same time.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Author of O'Reilly's Backup & Recovery and Using SANs and NAS
VP Data Protection
GlassHouse Technologies


-----Original Message-----
From: John Stoffel [mailto:john.stoffel AT taec.toshiba DOT com] 
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 3:01 PM
To: EMC NetWorker discussion; Curtis Preston
Subject: Re: Hardware and software upgrade, which version?


Curtis> I completely agree with not doing them at the same time.  Any
Curtis> thoughts as to which way is better?

Curtis> 1. Upgrade NetWorker
Curtis> 2. Wait a few backup cycles
Curtis> 3. Upgrade hardware

Curtis> Or

Curtis> 1. Upgrade hardware
Curtis> 2. Wait a few backup cycles
Curtis> 3. Upgrade NetWorker

I think the first is the way to go if you can.  Generally, I view the
hardware as the lessor evil.  But of course in this case he was
talking about a new OS as well as new hardware.  So you really need to
have:

1. Upgrade OS
2. Wait
3. Upgrade Hardware
4. Wait a bit
5. Upgrade Networker

or

1. Upgrade hardware
2. Wait.
3. Upgrade OS
4. Wait
5. Upgrade Networker

or 

1. Upgrade Networker
2. Wait a bit
3. Upgrade Hardware
4. Wait
5. Upgrade OS.


But it's hard to say, since it depends a whole bunch on how painful
the Hardware and/or OS side is going to be.  And whether networker is
supported on the various combos.  You might need to do:


- upgrade networker slightly
- uprade OS/Hardware to latest/greatest
- upgrade networker to latest/greatest

And each step in there is a bunch of smaller steps.  I've always liked
being able to just spin up totally new hardware and OS, get it patched
and all setup to talk to the backup hardware, then I move over
Networker to the new box, knowing that I had a trivially simple way to
fall back to my old working setup, without losing data.

I'm probably not being clear here, but hardware is cheap, your time
for doing restores/backups isn't. 

John

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