News & Events

Winner of our Newsletter Autumn Edition Competition

Congratulations to Steven Frost from Powerco who is the winner of our Newsletter Autumn Edition Competition. Steven has won a Panasonic Blu-Ray DVD player.

We would like to thank everyone for entering.

Primary support for NetWorker 7.4.x will cease as of 30th September 2010

IDATA wish to remind customers that as of 30 September 2010, EMC's primary support for NetWorker 7.4.x will cease. This means that any escalations to EMC over issues will require first an upgrade of the NetWorker software in order to rule out version-specific issues, or the purchase of an extension to primary product support. Rather than perform upgrades during problem resolution, IDATA recommends that all customers still using NetWorker 7.4.x prepare to upgrade their datazones to a fully supported version.

IDATA recognises that planning and executing NetWorker upgrades can be time consuming and divert staff from more important daily activities. Therefore we're offering special pricing for a 2-day upgrade service focusing on ensuring that the backup server and storage node are up to date, and providing planning and information assistance for the upgrade of clients and backup modules. This special pricing offer lasts for purchase orders received before 27 September 2010.

For pricing, please contact your account manager or services@idataresolutions.com

Annoucing the release of NetWorker 7.5.2

EMC released NetWorker 7.5.2 yesterday, this version officially supports Windows 2008R2 and Windows 7 clients.

IDATA was involved with the beta testing of this version, where we performed full system recoveries, as well as Windows 2008R2 AD recovery.

This version includes all of the latest patches released in NetWorker 7.5.1 through to 7.5.1.10

We would recommend only upgrading the Windows 2008R2 and Windows 7 clients with this version at this stage.

Networker 7.5.1 is still our preferred version.

You can download the software from this location;

ftp://ftp.idata.co.nz/emc/networker/networker_7x/7.5.2

EmailXtender archiving software is now being replaced by SourceOne

SourceOne has been written from ground up with new source code. The SourceOne software is tuned to manage archives, retention and storage tiering on EMC's hardware platforms, including Centera and Celerra, but also works with other vendor's hardware.

The SourceOne family of products has enhanced controls policies, retention, eDiscovery and overall information lifecycle management (ILM).

The SourceOne family includes three products:

• SourceOne Email Management
• SourceOne Discovery Collector
• SourceOne Discovery Manager

SourceOne Email Management: Archives e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino as well as SMTP and instant messages with international support and localized interfaces in seven languages.

SourceOne Discovery Collector: This is an indexing appliance that automates the in-house identification, collection, preservation, and policy management of unstructured content that resides on desktops, laptops, CIFS and NFS, NAS, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other content management repositories.

SourceOne Discovery Manager: This offers high-volume discovery search and collection for e-mail archived by the SourceOne Email Management software. Discovery Manager locates, holds, culls and produces archived e-mail in response to legal/regulatory or corporate compliance policies.

The initial release of SourceOne will support e-mail and instant message archiving with support for files, SharePoint, enterprise applications, XML and other content types to follow in the next 12 to 18 months.

Majority of the archiving products that exist today were created 10 years ago without an understanding of how significant e-mail would become over time. The sheer volume of e-mail is now in the terabyte range in some cases and eDiscovery has become an issue. Unfortunately back then Archiving developers didn't conceive of these requirements.

Scales is one of the keys to SourceOne. The software is built to operate in a single server for midsize companies and scales to meet the archiving needs of large enterprises. SourceOne's modular architecture allows for the dynamic addition of new content sources or other back-end repositories.

Current EmailXtender customers will not have to rip-and-replace existing installations because SourceOne can manage legacy EmailXtender archives

SourceOne is also open in terms of application integration through API support for partners interested in embedding functionality in the platform.

EMC claims SourceOne can save customers more than 50% in total cost and pay for itself in a year with potential savings of up to $1 million for companies with 1,000 e-mail mailboxes. The company also claims customers can reduce storage and backup costs by as much as 60%.

SourceOne Email Management and SourceOne Discovery Collector are available now. SourceOne Discovery Manager will be generally available in Q1 2010

EMC has recently announced a new technology called Centera Virtual Archive

This is a technology that ties multiple Centera content addressed storage (CAS) systems together as a single virtual archive.

The first version of the Centera Virtual Archive will be available December 10, and will support aggregation of up to four Centera systems over campus-wide distances.

Centera is EMC's IP-based platform for compliance-sensitive application data. The system uses a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) architecture to combine off-the-shelf, commodity hardware with intelligent management software at massive capacities.

The Centera Virtual Archive primarily creates clusters of clusters by logically extending the Centera CentraStar operating software to include multiple Centera instances under a single management domain.

Centera Virtual Archive is also capable of aggregating Centeras of all shapes and sizes, regardless of capacity or which version of the CentraStar software is in use. The caveat is that at least one node in an existing Centera must be running the Virtual Archive software.

With four Centeras it can assuredly create a massive archive. However, aggregating four Centeras across a campus may not be enough to accommodate the growth of archive data in some environments.

The Centera platform currently scales to as many as 128 nodes for up to 128TB of raw capacity per Centera cabinet (more as higher capacity drives become available). Multiply that by four and a single Centera archive can now scale to multiple petabytes of capacity.

"The total customer count for Centera is around 5,500, and they run the gamut from very large managed service providers typically selling an archive service to relatively small, discrete archives. Explosive data growth is the common denominator," says Thayer.

EMC plans to increase the number of Centeras supported under the Centera Virtual Archive in the near future. The company also plans to eventually extend geographic reach of the Virtual Archive technology from campus-wide to worldwide.

IDATA Resolutions were a proud sponsor of the South Pacific User Services Conference

IDATA Resolutions were a proud sponsor of the South Pacific User Services Conference which is a gathering of service-oriented staff from tertiary institutes in the South Pacific, mainly Australia and New Zealand.  IDATA Resolutions have worked closely with Victoria University to develop effective data management solutions for VUW's file and email data.

IDATA and VUW presented a conference paper on the EMC file archiving solution implemented at VUW (called Rainfinity) which outlined the challenges the University needed to address and the way in which the IDATA solution met those challenges.

Thanks goes to VUW for hosting such a well organised and interesting event.

IDATA is pleased to announce the immediate availability of IDATA Tools version 4

This new version represents a significant set of enhancements over prior releases of the tool set; we recommend customers upgrade to this new version at their earliest convenience to take advantage of new features.

Just some of the updates include:

1. Cloning and Staging:
   
   1. Both the "dbufree" (staging) and "sslocate" (cloning) utilities now support the notion of portioning operations; this allows staging and cloning operations to periodically pause themselves. This means that any queued recoveries can be processed sooner, during a pause in operations. In the case of staging, this also allows faster release of disk backup space. The minimum size for each portion is user-configurable, providing much more granular control of staging and cloning operations to the administrator;
   2. The "dbufree" utility has been extended to offer a variety of saveset ordering mechanisms not even available in NetWorker configured staging.
2. New utility, "list-resources", designed both to assist customers in their own scripting by quickly returning details about any configured NetWorker resource, and to act as a fast mechanism for extracting configuration details.
3. Documentation - man pages are now included in all Solaris and Linux distributions.
4. Reporting:
   
   1. The "check-clients" utility has additional options to report on used index space and NetWorker client IDs;
   2. The "client-report" utility now accepts custom specified fields, so as to allow both the standard and executive reports to be extended to suit local requirements;
   3. The "review-res" utility can now be run against an active NetWorker server, reports on storage nodes and supports the specification of custom additional fields for any resources so as to suit local requirements;
   4. The "find-files" utility supports a faster execution mode where additional restriction criteria may be applied to the initial selection of savesets to be searched;
   5. The "idata-notify" utility now supports including, within the report, the date of the last full backup for each saveset in the group;
   6. The "idata-notify" utility supports emailing all additional reports (totals, extended saveset attributes and last full backups) as a HTML attachment
5. NetWorker version support - This new release of IDATA Tools includes support for changes in NetWorker 7.5.1.

We're confident that existing users of IDATA Tools will find significant new functionality in this new release, and invite any of our customers currently not using IDATA Tools to install it today.

With EMC Financing, you get; Lower TCO, Minimize Financial Risks, Avoid Obsolence and more...

EMC Asset Management.pdf

IDATA provides operational management services to some of Australasia’s largest companies. We offer tailored solutions to meet all business requirements.

IDATA Operational Management

IDATA is providing operational management services to some of Australasia's largest companies. We have a highly skilled technical team of engineers, architects and account managers. We offer tailored solutions to meet all business requirements. Some of the services we perform and benefits of using our expertise are listed below;

Operational Management includes the following:

• Monitoring
• Log Review
• Failure investigation and coordination with the correct departments
• Fault escalation to case management
• Daily, Weekly Monthly reporting
• Media Management
• Media Requirements due to changes in policies or data growth
• Identifying media to be removed and inserted into a tape library
• Identifying what media is to be sent offsite and returned
• Identifying faulty media and tracking this
• Identifying media for historical restoration requests
• Identifying media for archival purposes
• Bug identification due to failure or potential failure
• Patch deployment
• Fine tuning for performance gains
• Configuration of new clients, this excludes installing the relevant software on the clients
• Configuration changes due to company decisions. i.e. need an urgent full backup on a selected day due to SAN firmware upgrade
• Environmental problem identification and escalation
• NetWorker security management
• License management

Benefits for Customer with IDATA performing this task:

• Certified engineers managing the backup environment to ensure data integrity
• Staff absences due to sickness or annual leave
• Staff training costs
• Staff management costs
• Staff resignations and replacement training costs
• Budgeted known costs
• Engineers understand secondary issues that may not seem relevant
• Review bug fix lists and expedite deployment when necessary
• Understand issues that other 100+ companies experience and implement solutions prior to these being experienced on your site. (Bugs and Environmental)
• Operations are familiar to IDATA engineers as they are performing these frequently across multiple companies. i.e. Database Restoration
• Identify items that could reduce time consumption and costs
• Multi-skilled resource pool, rather than one or two semi skilled staff
• Patch and new product testing, prior to implementation

Contact our support line "0800 Backup" to discuss how we can assist your business.

IDATA has successfully lab tested Windows Server 2008 Active Directory authoritative and non authoritative backup and recoveries with NetWorker 7.4.3. This includes Windows 2008 Core.

When performing an AD restore you should boot the server into AD Restore mode. Utilise NetWorker client to recover the "VSS SYSTEM BOOT" and "VSS SYSTEM FILESET" of the Windows 2008 Domain Controller and then use the ntdsutil utility to restore your required AD objects, or full database.

Refer to this Microsoft article for the correct steps:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753359.aspx

NetWorker 7.4.3 will backup Windows 2008 using VSS by default when backing up the file system. Refer to the NetWorker Multiplatform administrators guide for further details on AD backup/restores and Windows 2008.

NetWorker 7.4.3 is the only version of NetWorker that currently supports Windows 2008.

NetWorker Management Console can also be configured with Windows Server 2008, you must use the Management Console that comes packaged with 7.4.3.

Reminder: From NetWorker 7.4.2 onwards you no longer require a VSS license.

With the recent qualification of NetWorker 7.4 SP3 - a new licensing structure for virtual environments has come into force. This includes; VMware, IBM LPAR, Solaris Zones, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

With this new licensing model a single "special" client license called the NetWorker Virtual Edition Client is available, this is a per physical host license and will enable unlimited virtual machines to be backed up that reside on that physical host. With this new virtual client on the host, users can install NetWorker client code for file system backups in each VM residing on that physical host as needed without the need for more licenses or enablers.

For application consistent backups, one NetWorker Module license is required for each application type (SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle, SAP, etc.) used within all of the virtual machines on the single physical server.

For more information on how this approach may benefit your environment please contact Antony Bridle or Peter Mckenzie-Bridle.