Greg Baker is our leading HP DataProtector consultant. He is one of Australia's leading experts on HP DataProtector, and has been for over 15 years.
- He has worked with hundreds of clients, in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region, across just about every industry vertical there is.
- Have you been to an HP DataProtector (or OmniBack!) class sold by HP in Australia since 1997? Greg probably taught it. Greg's next scheduled class is probably going to be in Taipei in the week of 28th May.
- Greg maintains the Wikipedia article on HP DataProtector.
- Greg writes useful documents about HP DataProtector and HP Media Operations and writes unusual scripts to use DataProtector on different platforms.
The kinds of engagements customers find helpful:
- Health checks
- This is usually two-to-three days, often spread out over a few weeks in order to fully understand your backup cycle. We will make sure that everything is getting backed up, that you are getting the best performance you could expect, that all the options for disaster recovery and a complete backup are in place, and that nothing unusual is happening.
- Full implementation
- This takes anywhere from two days to five weeks. Everything: workshops with your team to understand their backup needs and your backup windows, project management of new equipment purchasing and delivery, software installation, deployment and configuration, and helping with setting up tape cycling procedures.
- Temporary management
- This usually involves around 10 - 15 hours per month to maintain your backups, add in new servers, address any errors and keep all servers patched and up-to-date. Customers use this at times when their staff are unavailable, busy with other projects or when they just want some peace of mind about backups for a while.
- Tape copying and migration
- Do you have a large number of legacy tapes that you want converted to a newer format? (e.g. DDS to LTO-4). This can be done quite cost-effectively.
- Cloud backup planning
- HP DataProtector works well in Amazon EC2 and other cloud environments! Whether you put your cell manager in the cloud or just the media and disk agents, you can dynamically add and remove systems from your backup specifications and know that no data is ever getting lost.
We are not HP resellers. We are not going to push you into buying licenses or hardware you don't need.
Our style of consulting is not to dash in and out leaving you with a system that you don't understand. Our philosophy is to hand over gently and make sure that your staff are comfortable and confident.
Greg Baker, in the old parliament house, Port Vila, with the
Vanuatu Ministry of Finance's backup team.
Greg Baker after delivering the first ever training in Papua New Guinea
on DataProtector.
Some DataProtector resources
- tape-zap.py -- a tiny program which lets you quickly update the location of lots of tapes as you zap them with a barcode scanner
- tapescan.py -- maintain your tapes' locations and boxing using a barcode reader, an android phone or an iphone (or a keyboard). Scan your tapes with your phone here
- omnisms.pl -- a mount script which sends an SMS
- DataProtector notes which I've written up as a result of questions in classes or which I have seen during consulting engagements.
- DataProtector patch lists
- A badly maintained list of DataProtector documentation