Children won’t be the only ones trick-or-treating this month. Last year, federal agencies reported an estimated 3,574 incidents every month in 2011 according to the Government Accountability Office. The same office also said incidents reported have increased nearly 680% in the last six years. Due to rising cyber terrorism and the need for increased cyber security, President Obama has designated October “National Cyber Security Awareness Month”.

Do you have a chief cloud technologist? What about a cloud architecture engineer? If you missed it on Federal News Radio the first time, take a minute to listen to Federal Tech Talk with host John Gilroy as he interviews DLT Solutions chief cloud technologist, David Blankenhorn. David fields questions on cloud architecture and discusses topics including:

When it comes to disaster recovery, there has historically been a limitation on disk storage. While tapes can easily be sent offsite to be used for restores after a site outage, disks do not offer the same flexibility. Some OpenStorage technologies, support out-of-band replication in which the contents of the disk storage are replicated between devices. In these instances, NetBackup has no knowledge of the data, which complicates recovery in a NetBackup protected environment because the replicated data can only be accessed after recreating the NetBackup catalog. Replication is done by importing the entire contents of the disk storage at the remote site using the bpimport command. The nbcatsync utility, introduced in NetBackup 6.5.6 and 7.0.1, can address this challenge as well, but it relies on being able to restore the catalog from a catalog backup and then post-processing it to reconcile the disk device mappings, resulting in a very time consuming process.

Who hasn’t run into that pesky old ‘Status Code 2’ problem? Your backup fails with a NetBackup message indicating that "none of the requested files were backed up." Well, let me dig through my notes and see what I did about it… Ah, yes! I remember when a customer ran into a Status Code 2 error when running an SQL database backup. In my investigation to help them fix the problem, I stumbled across a Symantec support article specifically focused on this issue.

LiveUpdate is a NetBackup feature that allows administrators to quickly and easily upgrade NetBackup clients under central control using a special NetBackup policy. Previous releases of NetBackup offered limited functionality for LiveUpdate, providing only the ability to upgrade to a minor update of the current version (e.g., from NetBackup 6.5.5 to 6.5.6). In contrast, NetBackup 7.1 has the ability to update a client even if it’s running a previous major version (NetBackup 6.5 and later). LiveUpdate operates with any supported NetBackup client system, including UNIX, Linux and Windows machines, and can update a mixture of UNIX, Linux and Windows clients from a single LiveUpdate policy. It’s important to understand that NetBackup LiveUpdate is not the same as the LiveUpdate service that many other Symantec products use. The NetBackup version only runs when the administrator explicitly executes it and it does not pull data from Symantec or any other location on the Internet. All update information is contained on servers that are controlled by the NetBackup administrator. It’s also important to note that other installation methods are still supported; LiveUpdate is an optional tool. If administrators prefer to use the standard NetBackup client installation utilities, they may still do so.

The race to virtualize everything has created a host of unintended consequences, not the least of which is how to meet the SLAs (service level agreements) for application backup. As we move into cloud alternatives this problem will only grow since your cloud provider will have to provide this to you on an application by application basis. Every virtual machine is essentially a set of large files such as VMDKs in a VMware context. These large files are typically stored in storage arrays which can be connected via iSCSI or Fiber Channel or on NFS volumes. Traditional data protection techniques such as VMware's VADP, or VMware VCB rely on an agent to protect VMDK files associated with virtual servers.

Alright everyone, stop talking to Siri for a minute and listen up. Storage Foundation just got Deduplicaton. Let me say it one more time. STORAGE FOUNDATION JUST GOT DEDUPLICATION. Just in case you missed anything of what I just said. Here you go…

Much ado is being made these days about consolidation and reducing the cost of IT, with virtualization being the drivers for storage management improvements. The truth is that storage management, as well as application management and OS management, has always been a critical component of data centers. The fact that virtualization puts more pressure on these tasks is no excuse for overlooking them to date. Virtualization and “cloud” initiatives are increasing the demand on data centers to the point that they have no choice but to seek efficiencies. Or perhaps it is budget pressure that offers no choice and the storage demands of virtualization and cloud initiatives are making it harder to realize the savings.

Symantec plans to release a full refresh of its Storage Foundation and Veritas Operations Manager software, which will include features allowing end-to-end management of private cloud infrastructures. Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) 4.0 is due out in May 2012. Storage Foundation 6.0 is planned for release in the second half of the year. One upcoming feature Symantec is planning is called Enterprise Object Store, which will use a global name space to offer a heterogeneous, enterprise-wide abstraction of all file data. According to Don Angspatt, vice president of product management for Symantec's storage and availability management group, the file system will be able to scale to petabytes in size and will be accessible through HTTP. "So this creates one common global repository. You can access data the same way you would [from a workstation] through your cell phone," he said.

Come one come all come see the greatest spectacle in the known universe… NetBackup 7.5 Beta. It removes excess body hair, cures mad cow disease, protects against the occasional snake bite, and Justin Beiber. Okay, so maybe these features are not in the NetBackup 7.5. However you can find these: - Primary Replication Management: Unified Policy-based Management of Backups, Snapshots and Replication. - Deduplication of storage in multiple deployment environments. - Single dynamic data protection solution across physical and virtual data centers including mission critical applications. - Enable the use of cloud-based offsite storage - Search metadata associated with backup images Want to learn more? Symantec’s NetBackup Guy can help! One size does not fit all when it comes to protecting applications- check out more information here: