Hello and welcome to another edition of webandformat.tv. I’m your tour guide, David Strom. We all know that you can’t be too rich, too thin or have too much storage but some of the things I’m going to show you today will have you rethinking that situation. Our screen cast will look at several products from Semantic that can help you cut down your storage requirements and then the process save a bundle of money. If you’re going to stop by in storage, you can’t manage what you can understand. We’re looking at the main menu of Veritas Command Central Storage, which provides an end to end view of your enterprise storage environment and helps you assess what to do with sand, dust and nest storage.

These products provide storage resource management and you can see at one glance what is going on across your network including hosts, individual raise and so forth. Let’s take a look at a particular storage array and see how much space is being wasted. Each bar on the chart shows that there is a lot of unused space here. We start out with more than a—space by the time we got to our actual applications; we’re using less in a 100 gigs.

We can do the same analysis on our center arrays and here, you see the virtualization report and again, how we start out with more than—allocated to VM where ESX server and see that less than 200 gigabytes is being use by actual applications on the virtual machines. The rest of the capacity is unused by ESX. We can also drill down at specific applications and see how they are using storage.

Here we’re looking at a particular oracle data base and we see that it’s just about out of space on its system table space, which could be a problem down the road if not corrected. Command center storage can also give you a view of all of your storage venders in one screen here and you see that almost 2/3 of our test network is on the allocated space.

Finally, we can see report that shows us the file aging properties and how much of our storage is being tied up by ancient files and the date in months when they were last accessed. Command central is great start but there are numerous other semantic storage products that can help cut the cause of storage including Verita storage foundation that can help within provisioning. As you’ve seen, you can create a lot of wasted space when you set up new applications in arrays and this product can trim that down substantially. Semantic also has its enterprise vault product which can help with moving data to more efficient offline or near line archives.

There’s another method that you can use to reduce storage needs and that is to prevent duplicate data from consuming your back up media by using dedu products such as net backup pure disk. Here, we’re looking at its main menu screen and you can see its various Mac, Linux, and windows clients. If we drill down to particular backup job, you can see that we can save more than 99% of our storage if we get rid of the duplicate data. This has big potential savings particularly the backing up virtual machine collections and also remote offices. Since the duplication technology is like this one, not only shrink your storage utilization but also shorten the backup times and reduce the memory in CPU use.

There are two different ways we can use pure disk to protect VM’s. One is to set up each VM in our environment with a pure disk client and here, you see we show the same VM’s that we have running on our VM where ESX server from the data management tab. As you can imagine, there are numerous common operating system application files that were backing up for all these VM instances.

Next to client if I do duplication, pure disk provides different options to secure and protect your client’s data. If we click on everything, we can see the various options as inscription, compression, banned with—that are available.

We can also do a backup of the entire VMDK file itself without having to install any clients on the separate VM’s and that is done inside the regular net backup inter phase. In this scenario, the work load is offloaded from the ESX server and the duplication process happens on the net backup media server. This needs a single pass backup can protect all the individual files in a full VMDK instance.

When we go to restore, we can choose either a normal file level backup where we can restore the entire VM machine for its VMDK files by checking on either of these selections. This gives us IT manager a lot of flexibility in responding to emergencies. One final thing, we can drill down into one of our VM specifically and see here, our data mining report that shows the aging of various files. As we scroll down, we can see more specifics on a particular files and how often they are accessed or modified. Thanks for watching webandformat.tv and check out our other screen cast on other semantic products. Feel free to send me any comments to David@strom.com.