HOME

PRODUCTS

SOLUTIONS

NEWS & EVENTS

MOOSE VIEWS

SUPPORT

ABOUT US

BLOG

Loading

Cover Story: How To Beat Morning Stress
Valentine's Day Facts
Microsoft's SCDPM - the Power Behind MooseSentry^TM
Chinese New Year Trivia Quiz
Have You Discovered the Moose Logic Blog Yet?
Moose Logic Coming Events
February Recommended Reading

(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)

Your morning can have a big impact on the rest of your day. If you are starting out your day rushed, harried, and stressed, it may be time to reevaluate your daybreak routines. Think about these tips next time you are scrambling to get out the door.

• Figure out what you have to do each morning and allow enough time for it all. You may have to get up a few minutes earlier than you are accustomed to give yourself enough time for everything.
• Breakfast is an important start to your day. Instead of grabbing coffee and a doughnut on the way out, try to get a healthy start to your day. This will give you a good boost to your metabolism. Try a bowl of oatmeal, some yogurt, cheese, eggs, or whole wheat toast. Add in some fresh fruit and you'll get the energy you need.
• Another great way to start the day is get in a little bit of exercise. Exercise boosts energy levels and endorphins, leading to a jumpstart of your metabolism. If you can exercise outdoors, you'll also get the benefit of added sunshine(unless it’s February and you live in the Northwest). This can increase your vitamin D levels and helps regulate the pineal gland, which controls melatonin levels.
• To make sure you don't forget anything, make a list the night before of tasks you have to complete before walking out the door. Include items you need to take with you and things you will be doing the next day. Knowing what to expect can help you feel less scattered in the morning.
• Children can get in on the act too. They should pick out their clothes the night before. You can also pack lunches and set out the dishes for breakfast. All essentials that need to be taken for the day should be placed by the entry door so nothing is forgotten.

The custom of pulling valentines from a box began around 250 A.D., when several days before the Roman feast day of Lupercalia, boys drew names of girls from a love urn to determine who would be their partner during the festivities.

The rose, which symbolizes love, is the flower most closely linked with Valentine's Day. According to myth, Cupid hurried off to a council of the gods on Mount Olympus, carrying a vase of nectar. When he stumbled and spilled the nectar, it bubbled up from the earth in the form of roses.

Although there were eight different saints named Valentine, in 496 A.D. the Pope changed the pagan Roman feast day to honor the St. Valentine who had been beheaded by Claudius II on February 14th in the third century.

In England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a valentine represented the person whose name was chosen from a love box. Young men who were pleased with the name they had drawn pinned the paper to their sleeve, giving rise to the expression "wearing one's heart on one's sleeve."

The first store to sell actual Valentine's Day cards opened in London in 1809, and by 1850 the custom of sending valentines had become popular in the United States as well. Approximately one billion valentines are sent each year worldwide, making it the second largest card-sending holiday of the year (behind Christmas).

64% of men do not make any advance plans for a romantic Valentine’s Day.

Women purchase about 85% of all Valentine’s cards, but, on average, men spend twice as much money as women on the holiday—probably because of the last-minute panic resulting from not making any advance plans!

Chocolates are a traditional Valentine’s present. The first time candies were distributed in a fancy candy box was in the late 1880s by Richard Cadbury (whose name is still legendary in the chocolate candy business).

Quotations: Love

“The heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others”
- The Wizard of Oz

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity” - Albert Einstein

“Love has the power of making you believe what you would normally treat with the deepest suspicion”
- Mirabeau

“A happy man marries the girl he loves; a happier man loves the girl he marries.” - Anonymous

“I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.” - Groucho Marx

“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” - Phyllis Diller

Last month we introduced you to our new MooseSentry backup appliance. This month we want to drill down a little deeper into how it works.

MooseSentry is built on Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (SCDPM). The first thing you need to know about DPM is that it leverages the Volume Shadow Services (VSS) that are built into Windows Server 2003 and later systems. That means that the MooseSentry is not necessarily the right solution for backing up earlier versions of Windows—unless you want to virtualize them on Hyper-V.

We don’t have space here to talk about how VSS snapshots work and still get into what makes DPM so cool, so if you’re curious about that, please check out our Moose Logic blog post on that subject.

Because it leverages VSS, DPM is very good at sending just the blocks of data that have changed as time goes by. This makes for very efficient use of both disk space and bandwidth.

The first thing we have to do when we set up protection of a data set is to create a “baseline copy” of that data on the DPM server. The DPM server will create an NTFS volume on its storage pool to hold this replica of the data, and a second NTFS volume to contain “recovery point” data as time goes by.

The DPM server will automatically discover what files make up the data we want to protect, and what physical blocks of data on which disks make up those files. It then creates a “bit mask” to track changes to those blocks - a small file with one bit corresponding to each block that will be monitored. As file write operations take place and blocks are changed, bits are flipped in the bit mask to indicate what blocks have been changed and need to be synchronized to the DPM server.

Periodically, the DPM server will perform a synchronization operation called an “Express Full” copy. This operation can happen as often as every 30 minutes, must happen at least once a week, and typically happens once a day. To perform an Express Full, the DPM agent on the protected server first creates a VSS snapshot so that data integrity is maintained while the synchronization takes place, even if data is continuing to change. It then sends to the DPM server only those blocks of data that have changed since the last Express Full operation.

Those changed blocks of data are used to update the DPM replica. However, we also leverage VSS within the DPM server itself. So the blocks that are about to be updated are first copied to the “recovery point” area. We now have the ability to restore the newly synchronized DPM replica, or the previous replica, because we can use the VSS data to reconstruct it!

If your DPM storage pool is large enough, you can store up to 512 of these Express Full snapshots for each protected data set, and roll back to any one of them!

But what happens in between the Express Full operations is even cooler.

SQL and Exchange are “transactional applications.” By that we mean that the applications themselves maintain transaction logs that track changes to the application data. DPM will pull the changes to the transaction logs every 15 minutes. That means that for an Exchange or SQL server, you can restore to any 15-minute point in time by rolling back to the Express Full copy taken just before that point in time, and then playing the transaction logs forward.

“But wait,” you say, “I process a lot of email. If I want to roll back to 5:45 pm, it’s going to take a long time to roll back to the previous night’s Express Full, and then play forward a full day’s worth of transaction log data.”

That’s fine. The solution, then, is to do Express Full operations more frequently. For example, during business hours you might do an Express Full every four hours. Then the worst case is that you would have to play back four hour’s worth of transaction log data.

Remember, you can retain up to 512 Express Full snapshots with their transaction log data. If you were doing an Express Full every four hours around the clock, you could still restore your data to any 15-minute point in time in the previous 85 days!

File and directory backups are handled a little differently. Files are continuously synchronized every 15 minutes. Recovery points are captured and retained at intervals you define. For example, you might want to create a recovery point at 6:00 am before the work day begins, additional recovery points every two hours throughout the day until 6:00 pm, then a final recovery point at midnight. You could then restore an individual file to the most recently synchronized copy, or to any previous recovery point.

Non-transactional applications like SharePoint are backed up by simply creating Express Full snapshots at whatever interval you feel is appropriate for the level of granularity you need.

DPM also has the ability to copy data from the on-line storage pool to tape storage for longer-term archiving of data. It can also transmit data to a second DPM server, so you can automatically get a copy out of the building (which is something we keep harping on in our articles about disaster recovery). So you can go from disk to disk to tape, from disk to disk to off-site disk to off-site tape, or from disk to disk to tape and to offsite disk and/or tape!

Of course, you know how we feel about tape backups—we’ve harped on that frequently as well. So we use a third-party software utility that can make a disk drive look like a tape autoloader...and DPM natively knows how to talk to tape autoloaders. That allows us to have a couple of additional disk drives in the MooseSentry appliance that, rather than being part of the on-line storage pool, are doing tape emulation. If you want long-term archives, you can purchase extra drives, and swap them out, just as you would swap out a cartridge full of tapes in a real tape autoloader.

The best part of all is that all of the complexity you’ve been reading about happens completely behind the scenes. Once the system is installed and configured properly, restoring data is as simple as bringing up a wizard-driven interface and clicking the mouse a few times to choose the date and time of the restore point you want to roll back to. If that restore point no longer exists in the on-line storage pool, but does exist in your “tape” archive, it will tell you which “tape” it needs.

We’re excited to finally be able to offer our customers a backup solution that we feel really good about—it’s reliable, it’s flexible, it’s incredibly granular, and it automates the most critical aspects of data protection, like getting a copy out of the building. It’s the backup solution we actually enjoy managing!

February 14 also marks the start of the Chinese New Year. How much do you know about this annual event? (Answers Below)

1. Every year in the Chinese calendar is designated by an animal. What is this the year of?
2. The Chinese New Year does not fall on the same day each year. Besides February, what other month might it fall in?
3. What color symbolizes good luck in Chinese tradition?
4. True or False: The Chinese New Year falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice.
5. The year 2010 corresponds to what year on the Chinese calendar?
6. True or False: Tea is the most consumed drink in the world, second only to water.
7. Most large Chinese New Year's celebrations feature a dance in which people move underneath a large, multi-person costume in the shape of an animal. What is that animal?
8. What festival marks the end of the new year celebration?
9. What emperor do historians believe invented the Chinese calendar?
10. How long does the Chinese New Year celebration last?

Here's a sample of just some of the articles you'll find there:

• I have anti-virus software installed - why am I still getting infected?
• Licensing Office in a Remote Desktop Environment
• Why you need good backups
• Provisioning Services, Microsoft Licensing, and KMS
• A three-part series on SSL Certificates
• Basic tutorials on virtualization

Come join the conversation at www.mooselogic.com/blog.

And don't forget our Facebook Fan Page - it's a great way to keep up on late-breaking news!

1. The tiger
2. January
3. Red
4. True
5. At least three different years numbered “1” are used by scholars—so depending on the school of thought, this is either “Chinese Year” 4707, 4708, or 4647.
6. True
7. A lion
8. The Lantern Festival
9. Huangdi, who, according to tradition, reigned from 2697 BC to 2597 BC, and is considered in Chinese mythology to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese.
10. 15 days

Home   Products   Solutions   News & Events   Moose Views   Support   About Us   Blog