Event Information

Topic:
Zmanda Management Console for Amanda Enterprise Edition

Date and Time:
Thursday, March 22, 2007 10:00 am
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

Panelist(s) Info:
Shailen Patel - Professional Services Engineer,
Dmitri Joukovski - VP of Product Management,
Ram “TK” Krishnamurthy - VP of Services and Support

Duration: 1 hour

Description:
The recently released Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6, contains Zmanda Management Console [ZMC]. ZMC is a web-based services that is integrated with the Zmanda Network. This release also includes Amanda Rapid Installer, a very simple and easy to use installation mechanism that installs MySQL, PHP, Apache and all …

Two days ago, we announced Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6. One of the
key features of the release is Zmanda Management Console - a simple,
secure and easy to use interface for Amanda. Zmanda Management Console
allows users to configure and administer Amanda backups, restore from
Amanda backup archives, and provides reports.

In addition to Zmanda Management Console, Amanda Enterprise Edition
2.6 includes Amanda Rapid Installer. Amanda Rapid Installer makes the
installation of Amanda Enterprise Edition and Zmanda Management
Console a simple process. Users just need to download the common binary for all
supported platforms from the Zmanda Network, run the installer, answer
few …

Today we launched our Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6. This comes with Zmanda Management Console - a totally cool way to install, configure and manage backup environments. This was result of an amazing effort done by our developers in past few months. This is how the navigation bar of the Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) looks like:

One of our most important goals while designing a graphical interface for Amanda was to simplify the life of a backup administrator. We found existing backup products in the market to be unnecessarily complex to setup and manage. I (and rest of Zmanda team) believe that managing your backups should be simple. In order to get backup going, all we need to know is:

What do you want to backup? (e.g. what hosts, filesystems and applications)
Where do you want to …

An addition to The Long Tail of “The Long Tail” related blogs

The Long Tail effect of open source has been discussed in several contexts. Some of the interpretations are likely very different from what Chris Anderson intended, but more and more niche needs of a relatively small set of people (which don’t have economies to justify product development by proprietary software companies) are being met by open source software. Witness more than 140,000 projects registered on SourceForge.

Whenever I install Red Hat Linux I am amused by some of the choices available for the language of the operating system - what is different when running a Red Hat box with English(Singapore) vs. English(India)!? It is also heartening to see support for regional languages making computers accessible to even remote villages (which don’t provide economic motivation to proprietary OS providers).

The long tail effect of open source …

I will be talking about backup and recovery of Web applications at SCALE 5x. Characteristics of Web applications create unique requirements for backup and recovery. The talk will discuss open source backup and recovery tools for file systems, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Conference guru blog provides more information on my session.

I would be happy to meet folks who are interested in Amanda, ZRM for MySQL and open source backups in general before or after the session.

We just published the results of Amanda usage survey and I want to share my personal observations.One of the most inspiring findings is that 95% of respondents would recommend Amanda to a friend. The Loyalty expert Fred Reichheld would be very impressed with such a result. The overall satisfaction with Amanda is also highlighted by the fact that 70% of respondents have been using Amanda for more than 2 years. People use software for such a long time only if it does the job well. Many users reported that Amanda was up to the task recovering files in most critical situations.

I think it is just great that more than 60% of users provided suggestions for new functionality.

Digg this article

So, I’ve been playing around with Amazon’s new S3 service. It’s essentially an on-demand storage-and-bandwidth combination; Amazon will scale their service transparantly to provide as much as you need of either. It’s pretty cheap, too, at $0.15 per GB per month for storage and $0.20 per GB per month for data transfer. I wanted to see what would be the best way to use Amazon S3 for backups with Amanda and MySQL ZRM, so I did some tests to evaluate the performance under various circumstances.

Amazon requires that you upload data in complete ‘objects’, and it wasn’t clear to me what the …