The future of Windows data protection - today

For many years, VERITAS Software has enjoyed an incredibly successful track record in delivering award winning, market leading backup and recovery software with their Backup Exec product-line. VERITAS Backup Exec as a stand alone product will continue to deliver market leading backup and recovery technology.

However, along with changes in the challenges organisations face in protecting their windows based data comes the need to deliver a new approach to protecting those computing environments. This is where the new VERITAS Backup Exec Suite comes in, setting the new 'Gold Standard' in Windows Data Protection.

Today's IT challenges
Within Windows computing environments the volumes of data having to be accommodated has grown - and will continue to grow - at an alarming rate. Also, organisations are putting more and more dependency on Windows as a platform within their IT environment.

Message based communication, such as email, is for most organisations a Windows based application running on Microsoft Exchange. Applications like Exchange and Microsoft's SQL Server are being more heavily relied upon and are required to be highly available. Not only available, they also need to be performing at a sufficient level to meet user demands.

Conventional backup methods can in some cases impact application performance and availability. Compounding this situation, the storage growth being encountered is having a negative impact on backup windows and backup tape costs. Resources are at a stretch for many organisations, particularly ones with backup servers or data storage distributed within sites or across multiple sites.

This often means not enough people to deal with looking after backups and the IT environment in general. Other factors such as data migration and the consolidation of servers and storage are another common trend within Windows computing environment.

These trends are formed as organisations try to update their technology and reduce the number of physical servers and storage devices they need to manage. So what does this really mean to organisations?

It means a number of things. Backup has always been something that impacts the performance of the server or the application that is being backed up and, because of this, organisations have looked to backup data at times when the impact on the business is minimal.

The current challenge is that the volume of data to be backed up - along with the demands for continuous high availability - means there is no longer an acceptable time to reduce performance or availability and accommodate a backup. Backup windows have become so small that a new approach is needed to reduce the time required to perform a backup.

Additionally, there is a greater expectation with users of the applications that organisations find ways to ensure that they can recover servers and data very quickly and that the data recovered is more current.

Organisations need to find ways to reduce or even remove the performance overhead on critical applications when backing them up, to ensure that the user's ability to do their jobs is not impacted. Another area where organisations need help is in reducing the costs of managing and acquiring their storage devices through controlling what data is stored and being able to clean out old and stale data.

The good news is that all of these challenges can be met with VERITAS Backup Exec Suite.

Backup Exec Suite
Backup Exec Suite combines three technologies to deliver the 'Gold Standard' in Windows data protection:

• Backup Exec 10.0 - the latest release of the market leading Windows backup and recovery software;

• Storage Exec 5.3 - offering hands free management of Windows based data;

• Replication Exec 3.1 - for continuous data protection of remote offices.

Backup Exec™
Backup Exec delivers centralised management and monitoring of multiple backup servers in multiple locations meaning less resource is required to manage the entire backup environment. The new Centralised Admin Server Option offers a single server for true centralised management.

The advanced disk based backup option and enhanced disk staging combine to address the issue of backup overhead by removing this burden from the application server and allowing for faster recovery times and more frequent backups. The advanced disk based backup has two components: synthetic backups and off host backups. Also Backup Exec 10 has the ability to do disk-to-disk-to-tape to achieve faster backup and recovery times.

Synthetic backups help out where your backup Windows are under the greatest strain. Synthetics allow for incremental backups to be performed at any time after a single full backup. 'Synthetic' full backups can then be created from the single full backup and the incremental backups.

The benefit being that you can restore a synthetic full backup in exactly the same way you would an ordinary full backup. The other plus side is that you only ever have to take one full backup which has a huge impact where backup windows are tight.

Off host backups allow the performance impact of running a backup to be removed completely from the application by backing up a snapshot straight from disk to tape via the backup server without touching the application. Where you require fast backup and recovery of files locally, staging backups to disk means you can backup faster, and also recover files faster, but duplicating those backups to tape also allows for tapes to be sent offsite for disaster recovery purposes.

Where organisations have deployed Linux servers for certain projects there is now a high performance agent for protecting these systems.

Storage Exec™
Storage Exec can help organisations to significantly improve backup and recovery performance by reducing that amount of data to be backed up and recovered. It helps in three areas: Reporting, Quota Management and File Blocking.

Storage Exec allows you to report on your entire Windows environment to find out what data is stored where, what type of data it is and whether it is legitimate business data. Having done so, organisations can typically free up 30% of their disk space, resulting in far less data to backup and recover.

This generally means a significant reduction in backup media costs such as tape. Also, if you discover unprotected data then you can start the backup job for that data from within Storage Exec.

The quota management features can significantly slow down storage growth by limiting the amount of storage capacity users can access, thus disciplining them into keeping their storage usage more under control.

The file blocking capabilities ensure that only legitimate business data is being stored through blocking files such as mp3 files and other non business related data. This File blocking technology is also hugely beneficial in cleaning out old, stale and non business data before going through a consolidation or migration exercise.

Replication Exec™
Replication Exec provides a solution for efficiently protecting remote office data on Windows file servers or Windows NAS (Networked Attached Storage) devices without the need to have someone onsite to manage the process. It also eliminates the need to buy expensive hardware for those remote offices.

An organisation can simply push the replication client out to all the remote offices, decide what data they want to replicate and achieve continuous data protection through replicating all the data back to head quarters to be backed up locally. If the remote offices need to restore that data, it can simply be restored back over the network.

Backup Exec Suite Integration
VERITAS' new Smart Link technology ensures that all the parts of the suite are integrated.

Once you've identified data to be backed up with Storage Exec you can use Backup Exec to backup that data from within the Storage Exec console. Any replication jobs can be monitored within the Backup Exec console as well as the backup jobs started from within Storage Exec.

Summary
The Backup Exec Suite provides a powerful and integrated solution for delivering comprehensive Windows based protection.

• Continuous Data Protection - for desktops, laptops and remote office data;

• Fast Disk Based Recovery - using the very latest disk based backup technology;

• Simple to Grow, Simple to Manage - the new CASO option and the Smart Link technology ensure great scalability and simple centralised management.

To realise the benefits of the Backup Exec suite try them for yourself using VERITAS' free evaluation downloads.