Information Anesthetic: Taking the Pain out of Backup

[Simon_Jelley]

It seems like businesses are looking at modernizing backup like it’s a trip to the dentist: too time-consuming and painful, and always costly! So they end up taking shortcuts, hoping that the cavity of data loss will never occur. But just as advances in dental techniques have taken much of the pain out of these visits, backup is finally experiencing a revolution of its own, thanks to new developments from Symantec.

Everyone knows what the problem is – it’s just too complicated. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’re performing root canal surgery in order to make sure you organization’s data is protected, and most importantly can be recovered. But that’s just how it feels when the amount of data that needs to be backed-up is growing so rapidly and as data centers grow ever more complex. The reality is that there are now so many physical and virtual systems crowding infrastructure that the average company has seven separate backup products, just to keep things going…and you note I said going, data protection cannot be guaranteed when there is so much separation of recovery responsibility.

So, what are we doing about it? Well, we knew it was time to re-focus on why organizations must have backup – to enable recovery. Specifically we have focused in on the three fundamental aspects that enable simple, consistent and cost effective recovery:

• Making sure you have a backup to recover from: This might sound obvious but in a world where data is growing, on average, at 62 percent per year, backing up within a given time window is difficult. In fact, in a recent Symantec survey, 49 percent of organizations said they could not meet their SLAs due to the volume of data and data growth.
• Removing the need to introduce and integrate separate solutions: Multiple solutions just mean more complexity and greater risk of being unable to recover, and we don’t believe our customers should be systems integrators that figure out how to unite these separate solutions.
• Making recovery easy: Why have backup if you cannot find the information you need to recover at the time it is needed and why impact recovery time by maintaining data within the backup infrastructure which is not needed for recovery purposes. Backup is for Recovery, not for long term retention, and certainly not for infinite retention!

With NetBackup 7.5, we have created a single point of control for all your backup needs across physical and virtual environments, so you can forget about having half a dozen point solutions. We wanted to save you time and money, eliminating the need to constantly maintain and upgrade so many different kinds of backup. By doing this, we have solved the three biggest challenges you face in backup today:

Break the Backup Window

One of the most painful parts of backup has always been the time required. It’s a big deal – a recent Symantec survey revealed that 72 percent of enterprises would switch backup products if it would double their backup speed. Not content with simply doubling the speed, we implemented NetBackup Accelerator, which accelerates full backups by up to 100 times. This gives you the benefits of a full recovery image, instantly available, at the speed of performing an incremental backup.

So what is the secret sauce? NetBackup Accelerator provides packaged in a single backup type the capability to read only changed files, dedupe these changed files, send only unique data from the client to the media server and from these unique changes, instantly make a full backup image available for recovery using NetBackup’s synthesis engine.

The results are astounding. Using old school backup, 1 TB of data could take up to 6 hrs to backup. With client deduplication alone, backup time is cut to 2 hours. With NetBackup Accelerator, backup time is cut to less than 15 minutes.

Unite Snapshots and Backup

Organizations use a host of different tools for data protection driven by unique service level agreements (SLA’s) and data growth. One of the most attractive options for backups are snapshots because they provide a near instant copy of the data sitting on storage arrays. However, utilizing the snapshot and replication capabilities of these arrays has traditionally meant that you also are faced with introducing additional tools to manage the backup policies and recovery of these arrays. Ultimately this leads to greater complexity and compromising ease of recovery.

With NetBackup Replication director, you no longer have to compromise: get the best of Snapshots with the best of data protection. New to NetBackup 7.5, NetBackup Replication Director gives you one place to centrally manage replicated NetApp Snapshots, from one console, so you can utilize existing resources and reduce spending time, resource and training on additional, unnecessary tools. You can monitor, search and catalog all your snapshots from within one console, allowing you to make the most of your existing resources and keep costs low.

Fight Infinite Retention

While customers are benefiting greatly from our built-in deduplication technology, they wrestle with the burden of retention and hold on to backups for far too long. Whether it is for eDiscovery, compliance or internal investigation, the answer is all too often ‘put everything on hold,’ increasing storage costs and making it more difficult to find information when it is needed for recovery. We have solved the retention issue with our new NetBackup Search option. This allows you to search and find relevant backups for an investigation, put those backups on hold and expire what isn’t needed. NetBackup Search also enables you to identify and move the information that needs to be retained for long-term retention to our market leading archiving solution, Enterprise Vault.

Finally, while enabling you to un-clog you backup, NetBackup 7.5 also makes recovery much simpler and quicker by the improvements we have made for operational recovery, which allow you to search and recover any files that exist in any backup or snapshot managed by NetBackup.

When you add these new capabilities to our existing, integrated technologies, like Dedupe Everywhere and V-Ray for advanced virtualization support, you see the power of the full NetBackup platform. In the fight against complexity, you have a new tool – NetBackup 7.5 from Symantec. We’ve taken the pain out of backup so it’s not like a visit to the dentist, but a walk in the park.