How to beat the shrinking backup window

At the same time organisations are looking for new markets around the globe and new opportunities to ply their trade and offer products and services. Today every scrap of business counts - no matter where it is.

While these business goals make perfect sense there is a payoff for embracing all the new technology. That is the creation of more and more data and it is growing as fast as we can figure out how to store and manage it. Every day we hear new statistics relating to the growth in data volumes, with organisations like Gartner group predicting 50-80% compound annual growth rate, and others even more.

This data has to be backed up and how we do it is becoming more and more of a challenge on a daily basis.

Many of us can remember the days when we would shut down the servers in the evening and back them up overnight then restart them the next day. Nowadays the 9-5 rules have changed. What was once a time for sleep is now a time to transact business with overseas markets. So with more data to backup and the luxury of the overnight backup a thing of the past when are we supposed to do our backups?

In some organisations it may be possible to run 'hot backups', where you use special agents in conjunction with your backup technology to backup your applications while they are running. In some instances this is perfectly adequate, but there is a huge performance overhead attached to this approach that can have a directly adverse impact on your ability to transact business.
For example, if you run a call centre to sell insurance, is the average potential customer going to be willing to wait ten minutes for your systems to catch up in order to do business with you? The answer is probably not.

Some organisations are being forced to reduce the number of full backups and supplement them with incremental backups i.e. backing up only the data that has changed since the last full backup. This sounds like a workable solution but again causes problems where recovery is concerned.

As backup windows shrink, so too do recovery windows. This is another potential area of significant pain to your business. When you look at incremental backups this can lead to incredibly lengthy recovery times because not only do you have to recover or restore the full backup, but also all the incrementals.

The only way to really cope with the challenges thrown up by modern business and to ensure that we can backup all the data, frequently, without an impact on performance is by deploying some of the more recent evolutions in backup technology. Also, by integrating a number of different technologies you can achieve some very effective solutions to these data protection challenges.

One immediate step that can be taken is to use a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solution such as NetBackup Storage Migrator to migrate large, infrequently used files away from disk to a secondary storage media such as tape. This frees up a lot of disk space and can significantly reduce the amount of data to be backed up from that disk storage - hence reducing backup times.

VERITAS' VERTEX initiative is another example of how you can deal with some of these issues. This combines VERITAS' market leading NetBackup technology with a number of different Snapshot technologies, allowing you to completely remove the backup overhead from the production server, eliminating the impact on performance.

It allows NetBackup to integrate with VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS FlashSnap, to allow you to create a stable, point-in-time copy of your data which can then be backed up straight from disk to tape via some form of data mover or a separate backup server. It can also use the snapshot capabilities of other hardware vendors to achieve similar results.

Another effective method to address the shrinking backup window would be to introduce LAN free backup. Very often, when backups are done over the Local Area Network this can be a significant performance bottleneck, both for the backup itself and to the other users of the LAN. VERITAS' Shared Storage Option, for both NetBackup and Backup Exec allows you to backup over a separate Storage Area Network (SAN) using fibre channel fabric, such as that available from Brocade.

This achieves far greater backup, and more importantly, recovery throughput. As well as removing the backup overhead from the LAN, it also means you can backup more data in the same amount of time.

Techniques like those mentioned above are just some of the ways to beat the shrinking backup window. As with any IT implementation there has to be a sound business reason for deploying a solution. With every organisation facing it's own particular challenges it can sometimes be difficult to know what the right answer is. One starting point in drawing on the experience of others could be to speak to VERITAS Consulting about their assessment services.

Having encountered many different environments, all with their own issues they can help ensure that you rapidly deploy the most appropriate solution that makes best possible use of your existing infrastructure. In short, VERITAS can help you to beat the shrinking backup window.