How This Book Is Organized

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This book is oriented as most publications: table of contents in the beginning, index at the end, appendices before the index, and a glossary mixed in there as well. Why are we bothering to state the obvious? Well, we think that when you approach a technology book, or any book for that matter, it is important to note where all of these components are first before you even read the first chapter. We often begin reading a book from page 1, Chapter 1, but rarely find ourselves picking out the gems of wisdom left there by the author (yes, we think we have one or two for your reading pleasure).

We want to offer to you a challenge: Do not start at page 1, Chapter 1 with our book; rather, after reading the introduction, read the back cover, scan intelligibly the index for terms that are of interest to you, then read the glossary and become familiar with the terms that we use in this book. Next, intelligibly scan the table of contents looking for chapters that pique your interest before you read page 1 of Chapter 1. This gives you a much clearer picture of what is ahead as you begin to read and hopefully a much more rich experience as you read not just our book, but any book.

Now on to the organization of our book. This work is separated into three parts. Part One is an introduction to backup and recovery in the enterprise. We felt it was important to lay down some foundational facts and information in Chapters 1 and 2 regarding data protection and why we would even bother to protect this data.

Part Two builds on this foundation. Here, we begin to look at the components of backup through a backup tutorial. After providing you with the background and basics, we take a more practical view of how to apply the information gathered in Part I by going through the steps of laying out, installing, and configuring a backup application. Since collectively we bring about 10 years' experience with VERITAS Software's NetBackup product specifically, we will be using NetBackup for the purposes of illustration throughout the book. NetBackup is the most installed backup and recovery solution in the UNIX space and is gaining considerable ground in the Wintel space as well.

Every site is different and unique, with different business needs and requirements. The business will drive much of the decisions for your backup plan, as you will see in our approach and some of the real-life scenarios we describe. While we won't be able to give you a step-by-step roadmap for architecting your backup and recovery system, we will provide you a firm foundation on which to build, with additional resource help on some of the components you can add to your environment to address your specific needs, thus reinforcing your backup infrastructure.

Chapters 4 to 7 really rounds out our discovery of NetBackup as a product, including discussions on its architecture, how to determine your media requirements, installation considerations, configuration, and monitoring. Chapters 8 to 9 really begin focusing more on taking NetBackup from its 'stock' configuration and enhancing it through options and advanced features. Here we also offer troubleshooting tips.

In Part Three we explore the ever-explosive growth our backup enterprises face and provide suggestions for dealing with such growth. You might want to read this section before finishing your architecture because it is always a good idea to plan for the future now rather than having to react to it later. We also take some liberties in discussing the future of backup. We take a peek into the backup and recovery crystal ball and share some of the things that are being considered for the future of backup and recovery, some that are in progress, and others yet to be explored. We have elicited input from some of the best minds in the field for this information.

Lastly, we have added some very rich content in the appendices to help you in your labor. You will find a business impact analysis (BIA) planning kit, disaster recovery (DR) planning kit, NetBackup tuning guide, performance testing technical note, Command Line Interface (CLI) guide, and a glossary of terms. The planning kits, while not exhaustive, do provide you a very nice starting place if you have not performed BIAs or created DR plans at your company. The tuning guide will give you very practical methods for making sure your NetBackup environment is performing optimally.

Throughout the book we will use our personal experiences with real-life client situations to explain particular concepts or topics more clearly.

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