LAS VEGAS—You think you have data storage issues? Kevin Donnellan, CIO of the Screen Actors Guild pension fund, runs a couple of Hewlett-Packard hardware-centric data centers totaling about 125 servers—one in “beautiful downtown Burbank, Calif.,” and one up the coast about 60 miles in Ventura.
The Guild has been using Veritas NetBackup for several years to back up and protect all the pension funds eligibility, health, human relations, financial and other personal data.
Donnellan noted that duplicate records remain a concern, which is why he said hes looking forward to the new deduplication and virtualization capabilities that NetBackup 6.5 will bring to the table.
“[Symantec has] the same vision as I do, as far as centralizing all the administration and keeping everything platform-neutral,” he said. “Everything is moving toward being disk-based, also.
“This is the wave of the future; each year everything just gets more complicated with new products and upgrades, and with new tools you have to learn. Wed rather learn one set of tools and let it go at that,” Donnellan said.
“We have this dark fiber [connectivity] arrangement with the city of Burbank, a separate billing item,” Donnellan said. “We have both data centers on it, and it works wonderfully well for us, very fast.”
A number of media companies and movie studios share the special fiber-optic cable line, he said.
In the long run, Donnellan said, hes looking to find a good co-location partner at some point so he can start moving his data servers to a safer, even more secure place.
“At some point, you get to wondering whether you should keep doing this anymore, that maybe you should let a partner do the data center thing,” Donnellan said.
“Were still a couple of iterations away from any big change,” he said. “But for now, our system works quite well for us, and were happy about it.” Donnellan said his current version of NetBackup works seamlessly with his HP tape and virtual tape libraries and all his disk backups—and in both locations.
“We do a nightly incremental backup and a full backup twice a week, and its gone very smoothly for years,” Donnellan told eWEEK at the Symantec Vision 2007 conference here at the Venetian Hotel. “We dont have to think much about it, really; we just check the logs once in a while.”
