Data protection is to meet recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of an organization’s information. Traditional wisdom states that mission critical applications require data protection methods delivering superior RPO (the less is the amount of data lost during recovery) and RTO (the faster to recover). A data protection solution may provide one of more methods to deliver different tiers of RPOs and RTOs.
In general, methods for establishing RPOs and RTOs improve in the following order…
Streaming backups < storage snapshots < continuous data protection
This is the story of a vendor promoting themselves as the advocates of storage snapshots. Symantec’s social media policy teaches me to be discreet and respectful of the competition. Hence let me refer to this vendor as Competitor ‘C’.
This Competitor ‘C’ had been scoring brownie points from some leading analysts by telling the story of storage snapshot based data protection. The story is primarily enhanced by a broad list of storage vendors they are currently supporting for storage-based snapshot management.
NetBackup had been supporting storage snapshots for over a decade. It had been available since the release of NetBackup 4.0V when ServerFree Agent and Array Integration Option (later absorbed into NetBackup Snapshot Client) were introduced. The second generation of storage snapshot management started with NetBackup 7.5 when NetBackup Replication Director was brought to the market. Obviously, we position NetBackup Replication Director to protect environments requiring superior RPOs and RTOs.
Recently Symantec commissioned Principled Technologies to put NetBackup and three other competitors to the test. The goal was to evaluate all four backup solutions for scalability and performance in meeting RPOs and RTOs. The first official report for NetBackup vs. Competitor ‘C’ for the battle of kingdom for scalability and performance is already published here.
NetBackup Replication Director outperforms the storage snapshot solution from Competitor ‘C’ by a wide margin. While this is great news for us, we were rewarded with even better, somewhat earthshaking news! Are you ready?
Let us consider a VMware vSphere environment with 1000 virtual machines. 400 of those virtual machines are hot with business critical applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint running. Principled Technologies is simulating real world workloads by loading these applications with programs designed to induce heavy activity. The remaining 600 virtual machines are hosting web applications with programs simulating real world web traffic. We want to create application consistent recovery points for the entire virtual environment. Let me list the results and some key observations.
Storage snapshots managed by Competitor ‘C’ |
Storage snapshots managed by NetBackup Replication Director |
NetBackup Accelerator based streaming backup |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Time required for backup (The best RPO possible for the environment) | 1000 VMs in 2 hours 50 minutes 21 seconds | 1000 VMs in just 38 minutes and 22 seconds | 1000 VMs in 2 hours 51 minutes 33 seconds |
| Compatibility | Storage array vendor dependent snapshot | Storage array vendor dependent snapshot | Works with any production storage including DAS. NAS, SAN and converged infrastructure |
| Implementation | Requires professional services | Professional services not required, but storage array knowledge recommended | Single Click on backup policy user interface! |
| Maintainance cost | Training recommended. Always make sure to verify the compatibility of storage array, array firmware, array management software, backup software plugin etc. before implementing changes | Training recommended. Always make sure to verify the compatibility of storage array, array firmware, array management software, backup software plugin etc. before implementing changes | This is as simple as it gets! No dependence on storage hardware. |
| Protection against array loss | Need to create backup copies from snapshots, additional time and resources needed. | Need to create backup copies from snapshots, additional time and resources needed. | Full protection against array failures as full recovery points are available in backup storage |
| Protection against site loss | Need to maintain similar storage systems offsite | Need to maintain similar storage systems offsite | Any storage can be used offsite, including commodity storage |
So what is the earthshaking news here? NetBackup Accelerator provides the same level of RPO for your business applications for which Competitor ‘C’ would have required storage vendor dependent, expensive, high maintenance array snapshots! It is time for industry analysts with withdraw brownie points truly based on how many arrays a data protection vendor supports, but rather look at how a vendor supports business needs of customers with simplicity, agility and performance.
Other blogs in this series
