Netbackup best practices for ridiculously busy environments (but not exclusively).

While waiting for another EMC World session to start (this one is at “Guru” level, let’s see) I thought I might share some of my experience regarding running Netbackup on very large setups…

Cisco WAAS benchmarks, and WAN optimizers in general

Lately I’ve been dealing with WAN accelerators a lot, with the emphasis on Cisco’s WAAS (some other, smaller players are Riverbed, Juniper, Bluecoat, Tacit/Packeteer and Silverpeak). The premise is simple and compelling: Instead of having…

On deduplication and Data Domain appliances

One subject I keep hearing about is deduplication. The idea being that you save a ton of space since a lot of your computers have identical data.
One way to do it is with an appliance-based solution such as Data Domain. Effectively, they put a little…

Processor scheduling and quanta in Windows (and a bit about Unix/Linux)

One of the more exotic and exciting IT subjects is the one of processor scheduling (if you’re not excited, read on, practical stuff to be seen later in the text). Multi-tasking OSes just give the illusion…

Data Domain Update

I’m not known for retractions and I’m not posting one. I did however check out the new DD boxes and the really big ones are far more capable than the old ones.

So, the techies (hats off for enduring a half hour with me) explained to me a few things:

Another windows tuning I forgot to mention

I use my laptop so much that I sometimes forget about some server-type tunings.

I resuscitated my hot-rod AMD box — it’s a grossly overclocked monster but only has 1GB RAM (since it’s hard to find that kind of fast RAM in bigger…

On windows filesystem tuning and funky cache mechanisms

Edited: I just realized I must have used different postmark settings for vista and XP. Do NOT use the following numbers to compare Vista to XP performance.

My opinion on the Sun/NetApp altercation: Both companies should be grateful instead of resorting to lawsuits

Since opinions are like you-know-what, and since I’m decidedly anatomically complete in that respect (some, indeed, claim all of me is composed…

I wonder when dedup will make it to the arrays

Anyone feel that deduplication is not finding its final resting place in backups and WAN accelerators?

It’s only a matter of time before the algorithms are run as a matter of choice on the array processors.