Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] NBU & Aptare - Real World Benefits

2007-03-19 23:23:17
Subject: [Veritas-bu] NBU & Aptare - Real World Benefits
From: ewilts at ewilts.org (Ed Wilts)
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:23:17 -0500
On 3/19/2007 9:49 PM, Scott Jacobson wrote:
> I'm already convinced of the vendor preference for Aptare as the third 
> party NetBackup reporting tool alternative, what I'd like to know is the 
> real world experiences for this tool and reports the can be generated 
> and realized in terms of:
>  
> 1. Cost management.
> 2. Process management (scheduling).
> 3. Capacity management (of which there are many. ie. tape utilization, 
> pool utilization etc.)
> 4. Forecasting (predicative analysis with thresholds etc.)
>  
> or anything else that has helped in terms of proficiency, driving down 
> costs and/or other economic benefits since having installed it into an 
> enterprise environment.

We use Aptare StorageConsole in many ways:
- identify when we're running out of tape drives by measuring utilization.
- identify when we run out of tape library slots
- identify tapes in the wrong pool - those tapes did not get returned to 
the proper pools so therefore were tying up library slots and forcing us 
to buy more tapes
- long-term trending.  We don't use the StorageConsole modules to 
forecast tape utilization but we use the volume trending graphs
- 6-Sigma quality control (we use a combination of exported Aptare data 
and our own graphs)
- scheduling quality.  StorageConsole helped us identify major bugs in 
NetBackup 6.0MP3 where jobs weren't being properly scheduled (fixed in MP4).
- distributed quality control - DBAs now check their own success rates 
and volumes.  The 6-Sigma graphs are generated by another group without 
our help (beyond the initial training)
- Mission Control reports are superb for seeing the success rate of 
individual mount points rather than looking at just looking at overall 
server success rates.  Helps identify mount points that are at risk. 
Especially critical for things like databases that are spread across 
multiple mount points or Exchange stores.
- on the capacity management front, we've migrated from one tape 
technology to another.  We're using StorageConsole to give us visibility 
into the individual tape pools and retention dates to see if/when we 
should rewrite the old tapes to new tapes.
- centralized reporting - we now report on both BackupExec and 
NetBackup.  We're primarily BackupExec in our remote offices.  This now 
gives us better capacity planning for our remote sites.

These are benefits from StorageConsole that we get all the time - some 
exclusively from StorageConsole and some in combination with our own 
tools.  I'm pretty sure that there are features that we're not using yet 
(some just because they're not as applicable to our environment as they 
could be to others and perhaps some just because I haven't mastered it 
all (like automated reporting)).

I hope this helps - I know I rambled but I figured you're rather a 
rambling timely report than none at all.

        .../Ed
-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org