Enterprise Backup Software
That Keeps Your Data Afloat
By Steven a. Rogers With Teresa Rogers
"Data should be managed where it resides in volume." That's the storage management mantra a colleague used to intone every time the subject of enterprise backup arose. This sound philosophy has steered many network administrators, engineers and consultants--myself included--through successful storage management projects over the years.
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Consider the plight of the network manager whose network consists of 500 GB of data on Microsoft Windows NT Exchange/BackOffice servers spread across the corporate WAN and 30 GB on a Unix database server. Because of dis
tributed NT servers and relatively slow WAN links, this manager wisely decides to forgo the idea of backing up all the network data to a central Unix solution. Instead, humming the mantra loud and clear, he achieves success by backing up the Windows NT data with an NT-based solution (that can be managed in a distributed environment) and backing up the Unix data with either a Unix remote client agent or a native Unix solution.
Apart from recovering files that have been accidentally deleted, one of the main reasons we back up data is to safeguard against disasters. Disaster-recovery options may require hard drives to be partitioned, formatted and even set up to reload the operating systems prior to recovering data. Others recover the partition and master boot record on the fly. It's also possible to gather the required device drivers on a floppy disk or tape to allow for easier recovery, but such options do not actually create a bootable image. To remedy this, some vendors are developing devices that boot a
microkernel of the NOS and backup software to perform the recovery.
In the past year or two, most products on the market have matured enough to
offer excellent basic support of tape drives, autochangers and the NOS itself. Look at most backup vendors' recent product offerings or price lists and you'll notice the change--they've grown from a few different backup products to a long list of storage management solutions. These solutions or options are key to solving customers' backup needs. The real challenge is choosing the right solution for the right situation.
Choosing enterprise backup software increasingly hinges on add-ons such as database agents, application agents, image backup options, client agents, accelerator or interleaving client agents, RAID options, open file agents, e-mail system agents and antivirus integration--all of which help create a superior backup product or product line.
Some of those add-ons may be familiar to you, others less so. Client agents, for example, are utilities tha
t typically run on the backup target, letting backups be performed remotely or from dissimilar operating system environments. If your enterprise is NetWare centric but also has a number of small regional Unix servers that run a vertical application, you should look closely at products that excel in the NetWare environment but also have a remote agent for the type of Unix your database machines are running. If you need to back up many remote clients to one or a few locations, an interleaving agent will do the trick.
In addition, most vendors have incorporated an accelerator or push agent--available either in the remote client or as an add-on--to distribute some of the data processing to the client. This consumes fewer resources from the backup host and improves overall performance across the network. Legato Systems has gone so far as to develop a technology, called parallelism, that pulls multiple threads of data from numerous sources on the network to a single backup device simultaneously. The idea is to
keep the backup device writing at its highest performance, an increasingly important concept because most higher-end tape drives can write data much fa
ster than data can be read from a single stream over a network.
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