UniForum Chicago Meetings

General Meeting

SANs from A to Reality

W. Curtis Preston

author of the O'Reilly & Assoc. book Unix Backup and Recovery

Tuesday, March 28 2000 7:00-9:00 pm
College of DuPage Room K-161

Abstract

Title: SANs from A to Reality
Audience: Administrators of medium to large sites
Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

SANs are now a reality and are becoming an integral part of data centers around the world. Whether you're not sure what a SAN is, or think that SANs are all hype and no reality, this talk has something for you. The talk will start with the basics of SANs, and end with how SANs are being used today in the backup and recovery industry to make the impossible possible - local backups remotely. The talk will include:

Why SANs are breaking into the UNIX/NT market
How a SAN is different from a LAN or a NAS
What it's like to do backups of large systems w/o SANs
The elements of SANs: HBAs, Hubs, Switches, routers, and AL_PAs
Why I don't call SAN routers "bridges," as some do
How SANs allow two or more hosts to share a tape library
What it's like to do backups of large systems w/SANs
How using a "costly" SAN in this manner can actually SAVE money
Lessons learned from implementing a SAN

Participants of this talk will be literate in the language of SANs and will be able to determine for themselves whether SANs are appropriate for their environment.

Speaker Bio

W. Curtis Preston has specialized in designing backup and recovery systems for over six years, and has designed such systems for many environments, both large and small. The first environment that Curtis was responsible for went from 7 small servers to 250 large servers in just over two years, running Oracle, Informix, and Sybase databases and five versions of Unix. He started managing this environment with homegrown utilities and eventually installed the first of many commercial backup utilities. His passion for backup and recovery began with managing the data growth of this 24x7, mission-critical environment.

Having designed backup systems for environments with small budgets, Curtis has developed a number of freely available tools, including ones that perform live backups of Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. He has ported these tools to a number of environments, including Linux, and they are running at companies around the world. Curtis is now a principal consultant for Collective Technologies, where they have developed a proven system for choosing a commercial backup utility when the environment and budget allow one to be purchased. This system has been used to select commercial backup systems for some of the world's largest environments, including a six terabyte Oracle database and one site with a total storage capacity of five petabytes. Once software and hardware selection is completed, they design and implement a complete system based on the customer's requirements.

Getting to the meeting

The next meeting of UniForum Chicago will be from 7:00 pm to 9:00 PM on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 at the College of DuPage. The address of the meeting facility is:

        College of DuPage
        Building K, Rm 161
        22nd and Lambert
        Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599

Take 355 to Butterfield Rd (Rt 56). Take Butterfield West to Lambert Rd,
then Lambert Rd North to 22nd St. Turn left and look for lot 10 on the left side of 22nd St.
Walk to building K, room 161 is on the first floor, on the east side of the building.

All UniForum Chicago general meetings are open to the public free of charge.

For more information about UniForum Chicago contact info@uniforum.chi.il.us.