Greg Baker is our leading HP DataProtector consultant. He is one of Australia's leading experts on HP DataProtector, and has been for over 17 years.
- He has worked with hundreds of clients, in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region, across just about every industry vertical there is.
- He has written several books on using HP DataProtector.
- Have you been to an HP DataProtector (or OmniBack!) class sold by HP in Australia since 1997? Greg probably taught it.
- 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. He is (in)famous for his documents, such as uncorrupting a DP8 database and change the UID that DP runs as after an installation.
- Greg's blog covers HP Data Protector regularly.
The kinds of engagements customers find helpful:
- Working out what parts of your support contract you can drop
- It's not that HPE's contracts are obscure and hard to understand. OK, well, yes they are. Email us your support contract, and we'll explain what it does and doesn't cover, confirm what you do and don't need and arrange for the best price possible on it.
- Recovering a corrupted internal database
- We have big-endian machines, little-endian machines in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours, and just about every version of DataProtector released. Sometimes we get customers whose database is a lost cause but quite often we can get it back into a usable state again.
- 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 eight 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.
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.
Greg Baker, with some of the HP sales, pre-sales and partners who attended
the first DataProtector Advanced training (Taipei, July 2012).
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
- omniperf.pl -- how fast are your backups going right now, and when does that mean they will finish?
- omniperfreport.pl -- how fast have your backups been running lately?
- DPHA -- scripts to help in migrating a cell manager from one computer to another, including using this for high availability
- vm-backup-audit.pl -- a script to audit a VMware environment to confirm that everything is being backed up
- 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
- How to use HP DataProtector 8 (Kindle format)