Ever walked into a hot data center and fear for the life of the machines?  Maybe while walking in that data center you tripped on a loose tile and did the Macarena trying to catch your balance just to end up taking a foot and a half drop because of the raised floor?  Well, progress is great!!  As of late, engineers everywhere have adopted a way to use the key principle of physics in data center layouts.  In the older data-centers cold air would be sent from the space under the raised floor to cool the datacenter but this would require extra energy (see figure below).

Most features in Storage Foundation are supported in a VMware environment, but let’s focus on the features that work differently in VMware environment and why certain features are not supported. Storage consumed by a virtual machine can be allocated directly over the virtual machine network interface (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI protocols), by passing the virtualization layer, and is therefore not affected by virtualization. VMware certification mark means that Version 4.1 and 5.0 of VERITAS Storage Foundation has been certified to run in a VMware Virtual Machine environment.   VMware server

Virtualization is very much on the minds of IT managers this year. Some have the vision of a low power, smoothly running, optimized data center; thinly staffed but capable of provisioning new users almost instantaneously (AKA 'Nirvana').

In my previous blog  IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud”, I touched on the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement, as they pertain to “physical” –  non-virtualized IT environments.  For this blog, I will examine the pillars 1) Service Strategy and 2) Service Design, as they pertain to virtualized or cloud based IT environments.  IT Service Strategies in virtualized environment

With the recent rush over the last decade to virtualize everything in the enterprise and products being marketed with “Green” or “Cloud” somewhere in the tagline, you would think that there was nothing left to virtualize.  If you make that assumption, you would be wrong. In many cases virtualization has truly consolidated the overall data center footprint, brought high availability to most environments that would otherwise not have it, and simplified the management of our overall servers.  I am quite sure the list can be elaborated on to include several points about being

Many organizations implement Enterprise Vault to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.  Enterprise Vault does a great job at archiving journaled messages and provides legal, compliance and HR department’s quality backend search tools to search and export archived email.  But what’s in it for the Exchange Administrators who already have enough to worry about keeping email running smoothly?  You can hear it already, “we purchased a new application for e-discovery called Enterprise Vault that you need to learn and implement.  Oh, by the way you will be supporting it going forward as well”. 

I work with a number of data center managers whom increasingly need tools that will allow them to handle expanding complexity with smaller budgets.  Symantec Storage Foundation maximizes storage hardware investments, and as a staple for UNIX systems, has proven to be reliable and capable across heterogeneous storage arrays. Many features have been added in recent years, and the latest 5.1 version builds on the product's capabilities.

Smartly managed data replication is an important element of many enterprises’ IT operations.  Good.  The problematic distant cousin to this is data duplication.  A sloppy, hard-to-avoid problem.  Data deduplication (DD) solves this problem by eliminating redundant data and reducing storage requirements—also known as "intelligent compression" or "single-instance storage".

With the release of Netbackup 7.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, I wanted to give you my take on the substantive features. There are three:

1. Expanded protection and recovery for virtualization NetBackup 7.0 is going to reduce the hardware requirements for VMware by eliminating the need for a Proxy Server for off-host backups.