Backup Encryption
Kerry Thompson
Thompson shows how to add encryption to your backups and describes some pitfalls to watch out for.
Respect Your Backup Admin?
Roger Feldman
Feldman looks at some backup scenarios to help determine the level of administration needed. He focuses on the real skills needed to run various backups and briefly describes some of the technologies used.
Off-Host Backup Processing with Veritas FlashSnap
Borislav Stoichkov
Backup times and the resources associated with them are becoming more and more important in the evolving model of 24/7 application development and content management. Developers all over the world collaborate on the same projects and access the same resources that must be 100% available during the business hours of their respective time zones. This gives systems administrators very little room to completely satisfy their customers -- the developers.
Contingency Planning: Lessons Learned from the 9/11 Tragedy
Lisa M. Jaworski
The terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, resulted in terrible human loss. Additionally, many buildings were destroyed or damaged to the extent that they had to be condemned. From an Information Technology (IT) perspective, networks were brought down, equipment and cabling were obliterated, and on-site and local backup tapes were destroyed. Because of the lengthy, ensuing chaos in the local area, it was very difficult for businesses, whose key IT functions were disabled, to bring disaster recovery personnel into the area. An unknown number of users lost Internet connectivity because their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had points of presence in the World Trade Center [14].
Enter the Storage Administrator
Greg (shoe) Schuweiler
The tasks of a systems administrator's job are changing. In small and large environments, systems administrators used to spend their days (and nights) managing any number of servers with locally attached disks with an occasional timeout for a game of X-Pilot, Doom, etc. We tuned the servers, managed the disks and the data, and backed up the data to locally attached tape drives.
Introduction to Oracle Recovery Manager Backups
Sean Scott
Taking a physical backup of an Oracle database is no simple task. For years, DBAs depended on complex shell scripts that would extract lists of all the files that needed backup, build SQL and Unix commands to put tablespaces into backup mode and copy files, and monitor the process for exceptions. Backups for large databases could run for hours because the process simply made a copy of each database file, and there was no provision for incremental backups. Perhaps the deepest, darkest fear of any DBA was to perform a database recovery and realize that the entire plan was invalid due to the lack of one small, yet crucial, file.
Database Migrations the VxVM Way
Rainer Raab
The duties of a Unix systems administrator range from the simple and mundane, to the complex and mission-critical. We are often called upon to reset a password, remove an unwanted file, restore a backup, apply security patches, etc. Though not very challenging, these tasks are important and must be performed with vigor. Less frequently, we are enlisted to perform a challenging task, offering us a chance to learn something new and prove our worth. Such tasks include operating system upgrades, building Web server farms, allocating new disk arrays, and database migrations, to name a few. Database migrations, which are the most complex and mission critical, offer the most reward and the opportunity to add new skills to one's oeuvre.
Monitoring a SAN with MRTG
Mike Scott
Storage area networks (SANs) are relatively new to the sys admin's toolbox and they bring a plethora of benefits. Unfortunately, they also bring complexity. SAN technology can potentially connect a server to hundreds or even thousands of storage devices via a single fibre pair. Similarly, a single host with multiple host bus adaptors (HBAs) can generate a huge amount of cross-SAN traffic, potentially causing contention on shared devices.
A Flexible System for Centralized Backup
Ed L. Cashin
Storage capacity is growing, and the increasing centralization of storage capacity is a current trend. Companies are buying storage area networks (SANs) and tape robots. A plethora of software products are available to help us back up diverse clients to centralized storage, but you may already have all the software you need.
Storage Area Networks -- Achieving Safe Shared Data Access
Ken Kutzer, George Ericson
The rapid acceptance of external RAID arrays in the 1990s established the way we currently work with storage in a client/server environment. In the future, Storage Area Networking (SANs) will dramatically alter the way we purchase, deploy, and manage storage. SANs will allow us to combine storage devices and servers in large, any-to-any networks, where we can create virtual connections between resources as needed. The drivers for this shift towards storage centralization and consolidation are simple -- boost efficiency, reduce management costs, and improve service levels.
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