Beyond Backup-- Disk to Disk Backup Comes of Age

NETAPP WHITE PAPER BEYOND BACKUP: DISK-TO-DISK BACKUP COMES OF AGE Adam Fore, Jim Lyons, and Kathy Trahan, Network Appliance, Inc. June 2007 | WP-7020-0607 ADVANCED DATA PROTECTION SOLUTIONS Disk-to-disk backup has finally come of age. Although backup to tape remains the most widely deployed backup solution in use today, disk-to-disk backup—or D2D—is rapidly gaining ground. As many storage-industry observers attest, D2D backup is increasingly seen as an answer to the challenges that are threatening traditional tape backup environments. Low-cost SATA drives, combined with advances in data management technologies, make D2D backup a vital component of any data protection strategy today. Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, NetApp data protection strategists compare disk backup solutions and offer guidance for evaluating the different types of advanced data protection solutions. . TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 3 DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES .................................................................................................................................... 3 THE DATA PROTECTION CONTINUUM............................................................................................................................... 4 CHOOSING A D2D BACKUP SOLUTION ............................................................................................................................. 4 2 BACKUP TO TAPE .................................................................................................................... 5 ADVANTAGES OF TAPE BACKUP ...................................................................................................................................... 5 LIMITATIONS OF TAPE BACKUP ........................................................................................................................................ 5 3 BACKUP TO CONVENTIONAL DISK ....................................................................................... 6 ADVANTAGES OF CONVENTIONAL DISK.......................................................................................................................... 6 LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL DISK ............................................................................................................................ 6 4 BACKUP TO VIRTUAL TAPE LIBRARIES ............................................................................... 6 ADVANTAGES OF VTL SOLUTIONS ................................................................................................................................... 6 CONSIDERATIONS FOR VTL SOLUTIONS ......................................................................................................................... 7 WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A VTL ........................................................................................................................................... 7 5 SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION AND CDP ........................................................................... 7 ADVANTAGES OF SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION......................................................................................................... 8 CONSIDERATIONS FOR SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION............................................................................................... 8 WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION AND CONTINUOUS DATA PROTECTION.......................... 8 6 ADDING DEPTH TO THE DATA PROTECTION CONTINUUM................................................ 8 BROADEN THE SCOPE OF SPACE EFFICIENCIES ........................................................................................................... 8 SECURE YOUR BACKUP DATA .......................................................................................................................................... 9 7 EXTENDING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF YOUR BACKUP DATA ......................................... 9 LEVERAGE YOUR BACKUP INVESTMENT......................................................................................................................... 9 SIMPLIFY DATA DISCOVERY .............................................................................................................................................. 9 8 NETAPP DATA PROTECTION PORTFOLIO.......................................................................... 10 NEARSTORE VTL................................................................................................................................................................ 10 SNAPVAULT FAMILY.......................................................................................................................................................... 10 ADDING BUSINESS VALUE ............................................................................................................................................... 11 ABOUT NETAPP D2D BACKUP SOLUTIONS ................................................................................................................... 12 D2D TECHNOLOGY INNOVATOR ...................................................................................................................................... 12 2 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age 1 INTRODUCTION An organization’s data is its lifeblood, and protecting that data is a strategic activity for information technology professionals. Backup is no longer a tactical housekeeping issue; it has become the focus of risk-management strategies that encompass data availability, data retention, compliance, data discovery, and data security. Not only is the backup environment becoming more complex, the amount of data to be backed up is growing exponentially and the risks associated with data loss are becoming ever more punitive. Just meeting service-level agreements for completing backups during agreed-upon backup windows and getting data off site can be a significant challenge for many companies. Backup windows for global organizations are not only shrinking, they are becoming a luxury that companies can no longer afford. Data growth and management complexity are putting so much stress on previous-generation backup systems that the ability to meet backup windows and recovery time requirements is in constant jeopardy. The rising costs of backup management create an additional concern by making it increasingly difficult to fund the infrastructure improvements that are necessary to meet ever more demanding levels of data availability. Backup to tape remains the most widely deployed backup solution in use today, but disk-to-disk backup—or D2D—is rapidly gaining ground. As many storage-industry observers can attest, D2D backup is increasingly seen as the antidote to the reliability and performance problems that characterize tape backup solutions. SearchStorage, the online publication of Applied Computer Science, Ltd., reports that D2D backup was the top search topic for the online magazine in 2006. In addition, Forrester Research1 reports that 55% of the 400 IT executives that they interviewed in August of 2006 say that they are already using disk as a staging area and target backup repository before vaulting to tape. And according to the Gartner Group, a global technology research and advising firm, by 2008 the majority of data restores will occur from disk, not from tape. MORE THAN INSURANCE “Backup has always been a necessary insurance policy. However, requirements for higher levels of availability and improved recovery in response to business drivers are causing firms to change their perspective on the priority and scope of data protection.” IDC 2006 Disk-Based Data Protection Report Low-cost SATA drives, combined with advances in data management technologies, make D2D backup a vital component of any data protection strategy today. Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, we compare the different types of disk backup solutions and offer guidance in identifying the solutions that will meet your needs. DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES All data protection strategies are subject to the same challenges and outside pressures. The strategies that you choose must take these considerations into account. Rampant data growth. No thriving organization is exempt from the pressures of managing and storing ever-increasing amounts of data. The amount of data that must be transferred, stored, and managed is straining traditional backup infrastructures. Your data protection strategy needs to be scalable to accommodate explosive data growth. Shrinking backup windows. All global operations that must be up and running 24x7 are confronting shrinking backup windows. It is not uncommon for a full backup to take an entire weekend and for an incremental backup to take all night. At the same time that backups are taking longer to complete, backup windows are getting smaller. Almost half of the IT executives responding to a recent Mercer Group2 survey stated that completing backups in the required time windows is the biggest challenge that they face today. And it is no wonder: Data that must be backed up is measured in hundreds of terabytes. Escalating backup costs. Unbridled costs for media and management are the direct result of the data explosion. These costs are robbing strategic data-center initiatives of valuable resources. ___________ 1. The Shift to Disk-Based Data Proetction Solutions, August 2006, Forrester Research 2. Total Cost Comparsion of Backup Technologies – IT Decision-Maker Persepctives on NetApp SnapVault Disk-Disk Vs Traditoinal Tape-Based Backup Solutions, February 2006, Mercer Consulting 3 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age Performance bottlenecks. Getting data off primary storage and onto backup devices without creating performance bottlenecks can be a big challenge when you have tens to hundreds of terabytes to back up. ECONOMIC REALITIES Almost 30% of surveyed organizations’ storage budgets goes to data protection. Compliance requirements and legal discovery demands. Data must be secure, unalterable, and in some cases immediately IDC 2006 accessible in order to comply with regulations such as the Federal Disk-Based Data Protection Report Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States, the European Union Data Protection Directive, and Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (J SOX). Furthermore, litigation support and ediscovery have emerged as major IT and business challenges. The rising penalties for noncompliance are making remote-site backup a critical issue. Remote sites require the same level of protection and access to data as the data center, but limited infrastructure and personnel make that an almost impossible goal to achieve. The lack of visibility into backups and information stored on backup tapes at remote sites is putting many organizations at risk. THE DATA PROTECTION CONTINUUM A typical backup architecture needs to provide for a wide variety of environments, including NAS, SAN, and DAS; data center and remote offices; a variety of operating systems; and a range of recovery point and recovery time objectives. When choosing a backup strategy, we recommend that you start with the data protection continuum. You should consider a range of solutions, from backup to tape to disk-based snapshot with replication and continuous data protection to meet increasingly stringent recovery point and recovery time objectives for your backup data. Figure 1) The data protection continuum. CHOOSING A D2D BACKUP SOLUTION In choosing a backup solution, it’s important to understand the varying protection needs for the different applications and data in your environment. For each data type, consider these questions: • • How fast do you need to recover the data after a failure? The time it takes to make data accessible after a failure is called the recovery time objective (RTO). How much data loss is acceptable in the event of a failure? This information helps to define the backup frequency. The maximum time requirement between a failure event and a point in time to recover from is called the recovery point objective (RPO). What is the operational backup window? How much time do you have to perform backups? This information defines the backup performance or backup technology required. • 4 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age • • • • What is your budget? How open are you to changing your existing backup infrastructure or processes to address the backup issues? Do you plan to continue using tape for on-site and off-site retention? With advances in data protection, it may be possible to consolidate tape usage at a single site or to extend the current tape investment. Your answers to these questions will help you to identify suitable D2D technologies. 2 BACKUP TO TAPE Backup to tape—currently the most widely deployed solution for data protection—is at the lower end of the RPO/RTO continuum. Tape backup often serves multiple purposes, including operational backup and recovery, archival storage, and disaster recovery. ADVANTAGES OF TAPE BACKUP Tape backup is characterized by low media cost, portable media, and the fact that it is off-line, unpowered storage. Backup to tape has a long history and is so tightly integrated with backup applications that much of the backup software in use today was engineered specifically for tape. Also, current policies, procedures, and backup strategies in most enterprises have all been designed for the tape backup environment. LIMITATIONS OF TAPE BACKUP Relying solely on tape for diverse needs is an increasingly risky proposition. Because of the amount of time required to restore data from tape, operational recovery and disaster recovery pose significant challenges for tape backup. These challenges are the driving force behind the adoption of disk backup. As the volume of data grows, so do all the other problems associated with tape backup. Because it is not possible to deduplicate data on tape, the amount of data that must be transferred, stored, and managed on tape is amplified when compared to modern disk technologies. Another major problem is performance; when you have tens to hundreds of terabytes to back up, bottlenecks are inevitable in getting data off primary storage and onto the backup device. Tape requires frequent, full point-in-time copies of data for effective recovery. CHANGING ROLE OF TAPE By 2010 over 70% expect to use tape for archiving only Gartner March 2006 2005 Gartner PlanetStorage Survey The time required to recover multiple TB of data streamed back from tape, cartridge by cartridge, can be a major liability. Increasing reliance on applications and data increases the demand for improved reliability and faster recovery times from failure. When data must be retrieved and accessed from archived backup in a short time to meet legal discovery requirements, tape may not be able to deliver. Data on tape can only be accessed sequentially, which significantly affects recovery times. Archived tapes must be found and mounted before they can be read. Every step is time consuming. Tape media and mechanisms can be responsible for data restore failures. Media failures, time-consuming restores, and the inefficient use of storage capacity all need to be factored into the cost of managing tape backups. 5 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age 3 BACKUP TO CONVENTIONAL DISK The first generation of disk backup is known as backup to conventional disk. This type of disk backup, in which backups are streamed to a conventional disk subsystem, has been around for a long time. Traditionally high acquisition and management costs have limited the use of conventional disk to only the most recent backup copies. ADVANTAGES OF CONVENTIONAL DISK The advantages of conventional disk are improved recovery times and protection against media failures through the use of RAID technology. Higher aggregated throughput can also be achieved by using the ability of conventional disk to accept multiple backup streams without the need for multiplex data on tape media. (Performance of tape libraries is typically limited by the number of tape drives they can support.) Conventional disk avoids delays to find and mount tape cassettes. LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL DISK The advantages of conventional disk come with a price, however. The acquisition cost of conventional disk has limited its use to only the most important data and the most recent backups. Acquisition costs for conventional disk remain high due to the lack of advanced storage-efficient technologies, such as deduplication. Not only are acquisition costs high for conventional disk, integrating conventional disk into an existing tape backup environment can be difficult, adding to management costs. Configuring and managing RAID group definitions and LUN creation, for example, can be a complex undertaking. Because performance of conventional disk doesn’t scale well, performance tuning can also be difficult. These limitations have hindered the adoption of conventional disk backup, and they also contribute to ongoing reluctance to embrace the new generation of D2D backup solutions, to which these limitations no longer apply. 4 BACKUP TO VIRTUAL TAPE LIBRARIES As we move along the RPO/RTO continuum to increasingly stringent requirements, we come to more advanced methods of D2D backup. First of the advanced disk technologies is Virtual Tape Libraries, or VTLs. Disk-based VTLs emulate popular tape libraries and appear to backup applications as physical libraries. As a result, they are easy to integrate with existing backup applications and are nondisruptive to both backup administrators and the processes that they manage. Some VTLs also facilitate destaging data from the VTL to physical tape to accommodate off-site tape vaulting for disaster recovery purposes or longterm archiving. Enterprises for which VTLs are the best option exhibit one or more of the following characteristics: • • • They want to preserve their investment in existing backup software and tape systems They want to use disk and tape in a tiered backup strategy They want to improve an existing tape backup environment that is difficult to change ADVANTAGES OF VTL SOLUTIONS VTLs commonly offer several key advantages when compared to tape. Like other D2D solutions, they are inherently more reliable than tape and do not suffer from media errors, mechanical problems, or shoe-shining. (Shoe-shining is the degraded performance that results from constant stopping and rewinding when data is not delivered at the minimum performance threshold required by a tape drive.) Virtual tape drives and media do not wear out with steady use; nor do they require cleaning and retensioning. Most importantly, an enterprise VTL can deliver an order of magnitude improvement in backup and recovery performance compared to a physical tape library. NONDISRUPTIVE D2D SOLUTIONS Backup to a virtual tape library (VTL) is a disk-based protection solution that is nondisruptive to the management of current tape environments. Forrester Research The Shift to Disk-Based Data Protection Solutions 6 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age VTLs also offer a number of advantages over conventional disk. The compression and deduplication technologies available with advanced disk backup solutions enable more efficient use of disk capacity and reduce the overall cost of a D2D solution. The ability to integrate with existing backup software and processes reduces management costs, and there is no need for backup administrators to learn how to provision and maintain disk devices. As a result, backup administrators can manage more backup capacity using VTLs than they can using conventional disk. Finally, there is the all-important issue of performance. VTL systems are designed to meet backup windows in large, enterprise storage environments—they move data at five to ten times the speed of conventional disks. CONSIDERATIONS FOR VTL SOLUTIONS VTLs offer significant advantages over traditional tape systems and go a long way toward optimizing existing tape environments. However, they are still designed to operate within a backup system designed for physical tape devices. In spite of the performance characteristics of your VTL, if you are relying on legacy infrastructure, performance bottlenecks may persist. Also, many VTLs do not allow you to leverage a VTL investment with other functionality, such as compliance and disaster recovery. WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A VTL When developing your criteria for VTL selection, it is important to identify the key problems that you need to solve. For most companies, the primary concern is meeting the backup window, so it is essential that the VTL selected be capable of delivering the aggregate write performance required both today and over the planned life of the system (typically three to five years). To be cost effective, the VTL must also provide capacity-efficient storage without sacrificing performance, using either standard compression, data deduplication, or a combination of the two. To be easily manageable, the VTL should be certified for use with leading backup applications and designed to be managed by a backup administrator. And finally, it is important to consider the impact to your existing tape infrastructure. If you plan to continue to use physical tape, you should search for a system that optimizes tape creation performance without increasing the consumption of physical tape media. 5 SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION AND CDP As we move further up the data-protection continuum, we come to disk-optimized solutions—snapshot with replication and continuous data protection (CDP). Many backup solutions are broadly categorized as CDP. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines CDP as a class of mechanisms that continuously capture or track data modifications enabling recovery to previous points in time. Products on the market today range from those that record every write to disk to those that make frequent point-in-time snapshot copies to provide granular restore points and fast recovery times (near CDP). Recovery to any NEAR-CONTINUOUS DATA PROTECTION DEFINED point in time is most appropriate for high-end applications with a near-zero RPO. On the other Comprehensive enterprise data protection marked by hand, snapshot with frequent replication nondisruptive backups and recovery within minutes. solutions have broader application. By providing An effective solution where cost effectiveness, streamlined application integration, network recovery points as frequently as every minute, performance, and storage efficiences are paramount. and by being very network and storage efficient, snapshot with frequent replication solutions are cost effective for a wider range of applications and data. With any CDP implementation, the operational backup window is reduced to virtually zero. These solutions are ideal when backup performance is unacceptable and no improvement in tape or disk backup target speed will get the data off the system any faster. They are also ideal when network efficiency is your priority—when you need to centralize remote office backups, or you need disaster protection and want to cost effectively replicate data to an off-site location. 7 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age ADVANTAGES OF SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION Data protection solutions that rely on snapshot and replication technologies can provide a wide range of capabilities beyond those of conventional disks and VTLs. With the right disk-optimized solution, you can shorten backup times from many hours to a matter of minutes without affecting the backup window or application performance. For most organizations, there just isn’t enough time or horsepower available to transfer several terabytes of data to tape every day. Because snapshot backups are so fast and nondisruptive, an organization can nondisruptively back up large databases throughout the day. Snapshot copies provide more efficient storage through inherent deduplication of data—only changed blocks of data are transmitted and stored, to provide what is essentially a full backup. This ability makes snapshot with replication technology ideal for remote-office backup and off-site replication for disaster recovery where network performance is often an issue. There are other advantages as well. Backup data can be served directly from the backup system. Data can be restored from moments before a failure or disaster. Restores can happen quickly because end users can restore their own data. And, with more advanced snapshot implementations, snapshot backups can be used for other business needs such as test and development or decision support. CONSIDERATIONS FOR SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION In order to take full advantage of their capabilities, snapshot with replication solutions often require changes to established backup policies and practices. Also, it is important that your snapshot with replication solution is integrated with your application to ensure that the resulting snapshot backups are recoverable by your application. For some applications, integration can be done through scripting; but for Windows™ ® applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, tighter integration is required. WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN SNAPSHOT WITH REPLICATION AND CONTINUOUS DATA PROTECTION Snapshot implementations from different vendors vary greatly in how efficiently they use storage capacity. Look for a solution that provides deduplication and efficient use of storage capacity. Many snapshot implementations—with and without deduplication—can cause a heavy hit on network performance. Inquire about whether they backup at the byte or block level or at the file level. The byte or block level is substantially more efficient versus copying entire file. An optimal solution makes light demands on performance and works not only for your remote offices but for your data center as well. An ideal solution is manageable with your existing backup tools, scalable to hundreds of TB, integrated with leading enterprise applications, and works for both data center and remote office environments. An ideal solution should also facilitate recovery by storing data in native formats so that it can be recovered directly by authorized end users and administrators. 6 ADDING DEPTH TO THE DATA PROTECTION CONTINUUM The range of solutions can be complemented with enhanced technologies to address the growing issues inherent in data protection. BROADEN THE SCOPE OF SPACE EFFICIENCIES D E D U P L I C AT I O N Traditional backup methods generate duplicate data as part of the backup process—every full backup is a complete duplication of a data set. Deduplication technology eliminates this redundancy without affecting data recovery. By discarding duplicate data strings and updating data pointers, deduplication reduces disk capacity requirements and enables you to store more backups more cost effectively. All data can be safely recovered in its original format from the disk volume. Deduplication technology makes D2D backup solutions more affordable for a broader range of data. Note: If your data is encrypted, deduplication is of marginal value. 8 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age There are three qualities that you should expect in a deduplication technology: • • • The smaller the size of the data blocks being deduplicated, the more duplicate data will be found. The process of deduplication should not affect backup or recovery performance. Enterprise-class reliability and media protection features are a requirement, because a single data block error or media failure can affect multiple backups. COMPRESSION Data compression encodes the information to use fewer bits This reduces the consumption of resources like disk storage and network bandwidth to accomplish greater efficiencies. Generally, software-based compression uses server CPU cycles to achieve its typical 2:1 compression ratio. Hardware-based compression mitigates this performance issue. The actual ratio depends on the types of files being compressed. JPEG files typically don’t compress at all, while Microsoft Office documents can be compressed to a tenth of their size. Compression significantly increases the efficiency of D2D backup solutions. SECURE YOUR BACKUP DATA Today’s backup technologies go a long way toward protecting your data. However, they do not take into account the security and privacy of the data itself. By nature, backup procedures introduce additional threats to stored data: With each additional distributed copy of cleartext data, you increase the risk of unauthorized access. Most disaster recovery plans place data offsite in a remote or outsourced facility, usually with less stringent security. With increases in information density, hundreds of gigabytes of data are easily stored on a single backup tape, significantly raising the stakes if that tape goes missing. By encrypting data before it is ever written to disk or tape, you can ensure that only authorized people are able to read the data. Your data can be fully protected against unauthorized access if a disk or tape is lost or stolen. Only authorized users with the proper encryption keys can decrypt your data. 7 EXTENDING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF YOUR BACKUP DATA A key advantage of advanced disk-based backup solutions is that they make it easy to integrate specialized technologies that bring additional capabilities to your backup environment. LEVERAGE YOUR BACKUP INVESTMENT Real-time, read-only backup copies can be used for a multitude of other business uses, such as application development and testing and decision support. Using backup copies in this way can help you get more value from your investment in D2D backup. SIMPLIFY DATA DISCOVERY Civil rules regarding discovery and litigation support, NO MORE WORKING AFTER HOURS such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, are growing more severe by the day, and the penalties for Since migrating to disk-based backup, our IT noncompliance are increasingly punitive. As a result, professionals no longer come in after hours or on weekends just to change tapes or check the litigation support and e-discovery are becoming progress of a backup. essential capabilities for enterprise storage architectures. Indexing and accessing data can be Phillip Rightler Director of Information Systems much faster when backups are on disk and the data is Thompson Coburn stored in native formats. Disk backup makes it possible to quickly search for and locate individual files on storage systems throughout the network—an ability that is invaluable when carrying out an e-discovery search in response to litigation. The penalties for missing deadlines associated with providing documents requested in a legal dispute are high—depending on the case, possibly in the millions of dollars. 9 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age 8 NETAPP DATA PROTECTION PORTFOLIO NetApp offers an entire portfolio of D2D backup solutions that address virtually any requirement and any environment. A key strength of the portfolio is that it is built on a common platform that provides unparalleled simplicity, flexibility, and value. This foundation is designed to obtain exceptional efficiency and optimization with a variety of technologies such as deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning. The portfolio features two families of technologies that are designed to address ® different needs: the NearStore VTL family for optimizing tape backup environments and the SnapVault® family for reducing reliance on tape and for meeting the most stringent recovery requirements. NEARSTORE VTL The NearStore virtual tape library (VTL) is a D2D backup appliance that appears to a backup software application like a tape library, but provides the superior speed and reliability of disk technologies. Designed to meet the performance and scalability needs of enterprise backup environments, the NearStore VTL includes highperformance compression technology and can be upgraded to include a data deduplication option for additional space savings. This solution reduces operational costs by simplifying the backup process and improving, rather than replacing, the existing tape infrastructure. The NearStore VTL can be used to back up any multivendor storage environment and is certified with all leading enterprise backup software applications. Figure 2) NetApp D2D data protection solutions. SNAPVAULT FAMILY The SnapVault family is built on the innovative Data ONTAP® operating system. Available for NetApp and non-NetApp environments, SnapVault solutions reduce cost through storage efficiency and administrative simplicity. According to a Mercer Consulting study3, NetApp SnapVault D2D backup solutions cost 54% less than comparable tape solutions. H I G H L Y E F F I C I E N T S N AP S H O T T M T E C H N O L O G Y The SnapVault family features highly efficient NetApp Snapshot technology. Most other snapshot technologies copy and rewrite data to another location, which affects system performance and system administration. NetApp Snapshot copies, on the other hand, are made without copying data from one storage location to another. As a result, NetApp Snapshot copies can be created in less than a second, regardless of the volume size or the level of activity on the NetApp storage system. DRAMATIC STREAMLINING BACKUP OPERATIONS NetApp Snapshot technology is also highly scalable. Up to 255 Snapshot copies per WAFL® (Write Anywhere File Layout) volume can be captured. Other snapshot implementations typically permit fewer than 20 online snapshot copies, and some permit as few as 4. The greater the number of snapshot copies, the greater the likelihood that desired data can be successfully recovered. ___________ NetApp SnapVault software streamlines backup operations by eliminating the need to individually back up to tape each of a dozen servers using directattached storage. Mike Irick Assistant Director of Academic Computing California State University at San Marcos 3. Total Cost Comparsion of Backup Technologies – IT Decision-Maker Persepctives on NetApp SnapVault Disk-Disk Vs Traditoinal Tape-Based Backup Solutions, February 2006, Mercer Consulting 10 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age SnapVault protects against system or site failure by replicating and vaulting Snapshot copies to inexpensive secondary storage. SnapVault software can be licensed on NetApp storage, and is also available as a software agent, Open Systems SnapVault, for Windows, UNIX®, and Linux® hosts. SnapVault provides a network and storage efficient backup solution for virtually any open system storage, including both data center and remote office environments. SnapVault deduplicates data at the block level by reducing data that doesn’t change from backup to backup to a single instance. In addition, data can be very efficiently replicated to an off-site facility by sending only the block-level incremental changes, greatly simplifying the process of moving backup copies off site. SnapVault technology allows backup copies to be leveraged for other important business applications such as data mining, application testing, high-speed search for ediscovery, and even failover in the event of a primary storage outage, while always maintaining the integrity of the backup data. S N AP V AU L T I N T H E D AT A C E N T E R SnapVault for NetApp Storage. SnapVault on NetApp storage offers the ideal SnapVault implementation, because it comes with all the benefits of the NetApp storage architecture and advanced data-management technologies. You get more storage efficiency; greater reliability and ease of management; better total cost of ownership; and more affordable D2D backup. Compared to traditional backups, SnapVault for NetApp Storage can shrink backup and recovery times by 95%. SnapVault for NetBackup. SnapVault for NetBackup™—developed with Symantec™—combines the comprehensive management capabilities of Veritas™ NetBackup with the storage efficiency and data access advantages of SnapVault. In this architecture, a NetApp storage system is configured as a disk storage unit in the NetBackup environment. Traditional backups are sent to the storage system, but as they arrive on the NetApp storage system they are deduplicated in real time to reduce capacity requirements. As an additional benefit, the backup data can be accessed like a traditional NetApp Snapshot copy, which means that end users with the proper permissions can perform data recoveries on their own. Data still appears to the NetBackup application in a conventional format, so restore procedures from the NetBackup side do not change. S N AP V AU L T I N R E M O T E O F F I C E S With SnapVault for Remote Office, you can standardize the backup process across multiple locations without having to employ IT professionals at each site. Two options are offered: • • A software-agent that backups your data to your central office over the WAN A device-based option using NetApp storage systems running SnapVault The NetApp storage system serves data to both users and applications, creating periodic Snapshot copies, and then replicates the backups to a central site. This option delivers higher data availability at the remote site, in addition to providing backup and disaster recover protection using SnapVault. D E C R U D AT AF O R T ™ Encryption offers the most complete protection for your data. Even if your storage media is lost or stolen, encryption protects your data from unauthorized access. Only authorized users with the proper encryption keys can decrypt your data. The Decru DataFort unified platform transparently secures data at rest across heterogeneous enterprise environments. The DataFort data encryption appliance provides military-grade data security without affecting the performance of your production environment. It encrypts data in real time and simplifies encryption key management across the enterprise. It is the ultimate solution for securing your data, whether on disk or on tapes moving off site. ADDING BUSINESS VALUE NetApp offers a number of products and technologies that can be used to leverage your investment in a disk backup infrastructure. L E V E R AG E D 2 D I N V E S T M E N T S F O R O T H E R D AT A M AN A G E M E N T N E E D S Your investment in a NetApp disk backup infrastructure can be leveraged for other data-management needs, such as WORM (write once, read many) archival and compliance storage. 11 Beyond Backup: Disk-to-Disk Backup Comes of Age G E T B U S I N E S S V AL U E F R O M Y O U R B AC K U P C O P I E S NetApp backup copies can be used in conjunction with NetApp FlexClone® technology to get more business value from your backup copy. This layer of storage is called smart copies. With smart copies, you can use a single backup copy of your data to create as many clones as you need for testing and training. A clone is a virtual read-only copy that takes very little space and almost no time to create. Only changes are written to disk, so you can afford to create lots of clones. Real copies of large databases are expensive; with clones, it is cheap to create a copy for everyone. Flexclone reference: www.netapp.com/library/tr/3477.pdf THE OBVIOUS CHOICE In contrast to the other vendors we considered, NetApp convinced us with highly flexible storage management and fast disk-to-disk backup. The NetApp solution simplifies administration and has helped us to significantly reduce costs. Thomas Enderli Head of Storage and ERP Ciba Specialty Chemicals AG M AK E Y O U R B AC K U P S E AS I L Y S E AR C H AB L E F O R E - D I S C O V E R Y The NetApp Information Server 1200 is a full text index and search appliance that is fully integrated with NetApp SnapVault. This integration enables rapid search of data in backup repositories—you can find the needle in a hay stack in seconds-for example you can recover email messages in just minutes. ABOUT NETAPP D2D BACKUP SOLUTIONS NetApp offers a complete portfolio of data-center proven disk backup solutions that deliver unmatched simplicity and value. NetApp is a leading innovator in D2D backup technology. D2D TECHNOLOGY INNOVATOR • • • • • NetApp Snapshot in 1993 Snapshot replication since 1997 250,000+ TB SATA shipped since 2002 D2D backup with Snapshot vaulting since 2003 NearStore VTL in 2006 © 2007 Network Appliance, Inc. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. NetApp, the Network Appliance logo, Data ONTAP, FlexClone, NearStore, SnapVault, and WAFL are registered trademarks and Network Appliance and Snapshot are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Decru is a registered trademark and DataFort is a trademark of Decru, a NetApp company. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft is a registered trademark and Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Symantec and Veritas are registered trademarks and NetBackup is a trademark of Symantec Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. WP-7020-0607