Whitepaper: NetBackup 6 .5: Enabling Next -Generation Disk-Based Data Protection

[Turls]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Influenced by factors such as disaster recovery, regulatory compliance, legal pressures, and IT risk management, many IT organizations need to enhance their current data protection to improve recovery and reliability and meet compressing backup windows. The challenge most organizations face is how to upgrade their current processes in an economically viable manner without disrupting users, applications, or infrastructure. Today, enterprise  datacenters are augmenting existing data protection configurations to satisfy both technical and business challenges in managing, protecting, retaining, and recovering corporate data.

Symantec’s Veritas NetBackup 6.5, the latest release of the company’s established market-leading enterprise backup and recovery solution, provides disk-based data protection for remote office and enterprise datacenter environments. Enabling nextgeneration data protection, NetBackup 6.5 provides a common platform from which firms can choose and manage a comprehensive set of cost-effective options for diskbased data protection. NetBackup  6.5 incorporates next-generation data protection features to enable higher levels of recovery, reliability, and performance while providing an economically viable and open architecture for different back-end disk configurations, all of  which are managed under a common administration model to provide operational savings.

TECHNI CAL CHALLENGES

Today’s backup and storage administrators, architects, and engineers face technical challenges in protecting data in increasingly distributed and dynamic corporate IT environments. These professionals need to manage not only the  data protection infrastructure but also the corporate data contained within it according to budgetary and human capital constraints. While meeting these objectives, technical backup and storage professionals must satisfy the  following data protection requirements:

1. Meet  shrinking  backup  windows while  facing  data  growth. The amount of data requiring backup is exceeding available backup windows and is exacerbated by data growth of 52% annually. With no practices for pruning  and cleanup of primary data or backup data, most firms add more backup hardware to address the problem. However, as backup windows disappear, this approach is not sufficient because there is not enough space or  money to continue throwing hardware at the problem. This challenge can be mitigated by eliminating the continual backup of duplicate data, which reduces the amount of data requiring backup and thus shrinks the backup window.
2. Manage disparate, distributed data protection products. Storage and backup administrators need to manage disparate types and numbers of data protection, replication, and backup architectures in both datacenter and  satellite locations. Commonly, a large firm will have an average of three disparate backup applications, many different replication approaches, and a varied use of disk and tape media as a target for backup. These  architectures are distributed across systems and vendors — often siloed by geography, business unit, datacenter, or operating environment. The disparate nature of these systems prohibits the unified management of  different application-driven protection and recovery service-level agreements (SLAs). The diverse set of data protection products results in multiple management consoles and agents and can challenge consistent policies and processes. The use of a data protection platform where different technologies and functions can be applied to meet different application requirements reduces operational risk, administrative overhead, and infrastructure complexity and cost.
3. Manage  and  improve  backup  and  restore  reliability. Failed backups, theresult of bad media errors, closed backup windows, network errors,misconfigured systems, hardware failures, and limited tapes commonly compromise successful recovery. When identified, unsuccessful backups require troubleshooting to locate the root cause and reinitiate the backup. Restore problems can include failure to restore data on a first attempt, lengthy periods to retrieve media or data from offsite locations, and inability to meet recovery objectives with current backup approaches. Increasingly, disk-based data protection approaches can aid in improving the reliability of backups through processes such as verification, volume spanning, storage pooling, and sophisticated load balancing and failover capabilities.
4. Support  virtualized  server  environments. Datacenters are deploying server virtualization at unprecedented rates to aid in consolidation, utilization, and mobility in support of dynamic IT. The ease of creating new virtualized applications and systems creates pressures on storage and backup teams to keep up with data protection services while meeting compressing SLAs. Data protection environments need to detect new virtual machines and protect them in a manner that does not compromise performance, availability, and recovery expectations.
5. Protect  remote  and  branch  offices. Large U.S. firms (those with more than 5,000 employees) have an average of 258 branch and remote offices. Often, distributed file, print, and application data is stored locally to these remote locations, while the challenges of protecting this data prohibit its successful backup. These challenges include limited local technical staff, reliance on manual tape backup processes, and limited WAN bandwidth while the business cannot tolerate data loss or lack of data recovery or productivity in remote and branch operations.
6. Ensure  select  data  is  encrypted. When firms use removable media that is placed offsite, sensitive data cannot be compromised. Some vertical industries face requirements that specific content, such as credit card and customer data, be encrypted. In these circumstances, technical professionals must implement an encryption approach while managing ease-of-administration, performance, and budget requirements. Some firms are choosing to implement tape encryption, while others seek to eliminate removable media, instead relying upon some form of offsite electronic vaulting. IT management has to properly assess trade-offs in performance and security to determine how and where to encrypt data. For instance, client encryption protects data backup streams at the source and when traveling over the network while adding some performance overhead, whereas media server encryption eliminates both network performance overhead and security while securing the data at rest.
7. Enable disaster recovery. Natural as well as human-generated (operator error, sabotage, terrorist attacks) and environmental (equipment, network, power) disasters require disaster recovery planning and capability. Consistent with shortening recovery times, upon a disaster, firms cannot afford days to recover sites, systems, and data. Technology, in combination with policies, procedures, and people, is a key enabler of recovering business operations in the event of a disaster. Challenges with disaster recovery include inefficient or untested disaster recovery plans, time lapses before recovery can be done, and difficulties in recovering the "exact" data protection infrastructure to enable data recovery.

To read the complete article, please download the PDF.