Disk Backup Appliances: The Next Generation

Disk Backup Appliances: The Next Generation Prepared by TechRepublic exclusively for

CONTENTS: Introduction... 3 Tape: 60 Years of History... 3 Why Tape Fails Us... 5 Disk: Tape s Replacement... 6 Disaster Recovery... 8 Dell s Disk-Based Backup Appliance Solutions... 9 Conclusion Think In The Box For Backup To Disk Efficiency... 15 About Dell Software... 15 About this white paper: This document has been prepared by CBS Interactive on behalf of Dell Software. Dell Software has specified topic, title and key themes of this guide and may have contributed to and exercised editorial control over the content. This white paper may only be quoted and reproduced by Dell Software in its entirety. 2

INTRODUCTION Each time your storage grows, so do your backups. The strain on legacy backup systems has reached a boiling point for many businesses. Backup shouldn t be a burden on your business but it often is. Backup windows have stretched to the point where many spill over into your productive day. Network bandwidth is consumed by backup traffic as the volume of backup data expands exponentially. Managing complex, temperamental backup and restore solutions wastes hundreds of IT staff hours per year. Productivity falls, backups fail, and restorable data may or may not exist. If you haven t examined your backup strategy relative to the current goals of your business, you may be wasting valuable resources and exposing your business to unnecessary risk and expense. Dell s Data Protection solutions can help you optimize your IT resources. This paper outlines how Dell s line of disk-backup appliances can save you time on deployment and day-to-day management, give you options for deduplicating your data, shrink your backup windows, minimize network traffic, and significantly reduce your backup storage footprint. TAPE: 60 YEARS OF HISTORY Tape: the final frontier. Its 60-year mission has been impressive but now it s time to explore new backup, restore, and disaster recovery technologies. Tape has had a good run and still has its place as a long-term archival storage medium. TAPE STRATEGIES Historically, tape has been the medium for backup and archive processes in businesses of all sizes from the smallest companies with a single server hidden under a desk to the largest enterprise that consumes thousands of square feet in multiple data centers. Tape is the common technology that has bound the information technology field since its inception. The accepted practice for many large companies dictates that near the first of the month, you must perform a full backup of your systems. This backup takes place over the course of an entire weekend. Between full backups, administrators set their systems to backup incrementally or differentially. Incremental backups require less space during backup but the most time during a restore event. Differential backups, alternatively, require the most media and the most time for backup but the least amount of time to restore. A differential backup is a cumulative backup of all changes made since the last full backup. An incremental backup is one that provides a backup of files that have changed or are new since the last incremental backup. 3

TAPE MANAGEMENT Tape management is one major aspect of tape media that many forget to consider when factoring costs into a backup solution. Tape media requires many touch points during backup and restoration. Those touch points span loading to offsite storage to include: loading tapes into autoloaders removing tapes from autoloaders transporting tapes from autoloaders to a packing area packing the tapes into safe containers transporting tape containers to an offsite facility for cataloging and storage For restore events, tapes must cycle through the touch points in reverse. 4

Tapes must be rotated back into the pool of available media on an ongoing basis. Caring for tape media is timeconsuming for businesses. In that regard, tape media care requires record keeping. Record keeping requirements include: chain-of-custody and cataloging wear dating expiration dates disposal information It is those requirements that make tape media care difficult to deal with from an administrative point-of-view. And then there are the final tape maintenance procedures: destruction and disposal. A single tape is inexpensive to buy at the time of purchase, but that tape grows more expensive by the time it reaches disposal, when you factor in labor, transportation, storage, and disposal. WHY TAPE FAILS US Complementing the rising cost of using tape, tape no longer effectively handles the volumes of data within the time constraints placed on it by production needs. Backups running during business hours cause performance hits on the source servers and on the network. Backup administrators either stop long-running backups or alter what s being backed up on systems that may result in missing critical information. Even if you segment off your backup network, you re still competing with hundreds or thousands of other backups occurring at the same time: the off-peak backup window. VIRTUALIZATION For all the freedom virtualization brings to businesses, it introduces new backup and restore challenges. It s not that traditional, agent-based virtual machine backup and restore are more difficult; it s that now we re compelled to backup the virtual machine disk files. The decision to backup hundreds of virtual machine disk files has caused the amount of backup data to grow at an exponential rate. Complete virtual machine disk files can range from twenty gigabytes to multiple terabytes in size. These huge volumes of data create extreme stress on backup solutions and storage media requirements. The amount of data generated from backup of virtual machine disk files is out of control. And it grows each time you deploy a new virtual machine. A traditional incremental or differential backup for virtual machine files just isn t feasible. DATA GROWTH Ever-expanding volumes of data are a real and growing problem for companies of all sizes. One of the problems is that data sets have become so large and so complex that traditional backup methods have extended backup windows into the productive work day. 5

UNSTRUCTURED DATA A majority of the data generated in organizations is unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that isn t contained in a database nor is it indexed in any usable fashion. Unstructured data consists of files: documents, Web pages, images, audio, video, text, virtual machine-related files, and so on. DISK: TAPE S REPLACEMENT Disk-based backup isn t a very new concept. For many years, IT professionals have used RAID storage arrays to provide something akin to a disk-based backup for mission-critical servers. Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) Directly-Attached Storage (DAS) disks in the form of Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), and other external disk solutions have provided tape-frustrated administrators with faster backups and more peace of mind. Many factors are changing former tape zealots into disk converts. Price is just one of those factors. TRANSITIONAL TECHNOLOGIES The newest trend in backup and restore technology is to stage data onto disk, usually in the form of Tier 2 SAN. After data has aged past a retention period, it s offloaded again from disk to tape. However, as you can see in the graph, (Figure 1) businesses are now moving away from transitional disk-to-disk-to-tape scenarios. It has become clear, from the data shown in Figure 1, that volumes of backup data have grown too large even for temporary storage. 6

These disk-to-disk-to-tape scenarios only move the problem from one set of disks to another. It s true that disk-to-disk backups are faster and source servers spend fewer cycles of performance overhead for backup but consider the length of time that data remains on your transitional storage. Transitional storage data volumes are so large that backups never stop running while more data piles up from subsequent backups. Deduplication: After an initial full backup, deduplication software compares data from the source and backup locations and backs up only those blocks of data that are new or changed since the last backup. Deduplication prevents wasting of bandwidth, time, and space, which maximizes your backup efficiency. DEDUPLICATION One solution to the ever-growing volume of data is to deduplicate it. Deduplication is a form of compression where the process of removing duplicate data from your file systems is handled by the backup software or backup server. And that doesn t mean simply removing multiple copies or duplicates blocks of files. It is a technology that allows your backup process to distinguish specific changed blocks within files thereby preventing small changes from triggering complete backups. For example, if you have a one-gigabyte file that changes by one percent per day, at the end of ten days, your full backups have collected more than ten gigabytes worth of data that has only changed just over ten percent from its original size. However, deploying deduplication technology, the total file size would weigh in at just over 1.1 gigabytes in size. As you can see, you ve saved a tremendous amount of space by using deduplication. What happens with deduplication is that only the bits that have changed each day get flagged for backup. So, after a single full backup of your system, only the amounts of actual file changes are saved to media. Deduplication saves space on your backup media. COMPRESSION Dell s new data storage compression capabilities help customers reduce file sizes and the overall footprints of archival and cloud infrastructure storage. Less consumed storage results in lower TCO and a longer life expectancy for your current storage solution. And Dell s compression takes place inline, which means data is compressed before it s copied to the backup destination, so that your valuable disk space isn t consumed with file staging during the compression process. Data reduction is an important step in saving space and money in your data center. Compression technologies and results vary widely among vendors but most are able to reduce file sizes in the range of 80 percent or more. Obviously some file types can be compressed more than others to achieve this range of reduction. Reducing raw file sizes is important in any long-term backup-and-restore strategy. Compression saves network bandwidth when replicating data over network links making backups and restores faster and more efficient. And reducing network bandwidth required for replication and disaster recovery saves money. 7

ADVANTAGES OF DISK-BASED BACKUP There are other factors that are motivating companies to move toward a disk-based backup system. The raw cost of media drops out as a factor when considering the many advantages of disk over tape as a backup target. Speed: Although tape advocates argue the point that tape is as fast as disk; disk has a much higher sustained file transfer rate than tape, thereby reducing backup windows and production loss. Automation: Tape backups are automated processes; however, once a file is on tape, it can only be accessed via a tape drive and is therefore static. Not so for disk-based files. Using scripts, software, and scheduling, one can automate replication between sites, aged file deletion, movement of files between storage units, file renaming, permissions changes, and so on. Replication: Using disk-based appliances for replication of backup files, one can keep a disaster recovery site synchronized with a primary site or utilize a central site as a repository for replication of files from remote sites. Concurrency: Running multiple backups at once is a major advantage of disk-based backup. Concurrency makes backups far more efficient than running sequential, streaming ones. This is one of the primary motivations in moving to disk-based backup systems, including VTLs. Compression reduces the size of data that is stored and protected which can help reduce complexity and network resource contention while improving backup and recovery times. DISASTER RECOVERY Disaster recovery means restoring tapes to your DR site so that you can resume operations after some catastrophic failure at your primary site. It s a procedure, which could take days, if not weeks, depending on the number of systems required for restoring your business to operational status. Having a good DR readiness plan is only part of the overall picture. You have to have the correct solution in place or your disaster recovery plan will seem more like a disaster than the outage that took you there. Disk-based, automated replication can help bring your business back online quickly and painlessly. The following is a list of features that you should consider when selecting disaster recovery hardware and software: The number of simultaneous replication nodes Hardware and software health monitoring Support for replication during ingest/restore at the source or target Support for concurrent replication of OST, NFS, and CIFS containers Support for negative acknowledgement across multiple nodes 8

DELL S DISK-BASED BACKUP APPLIANCE SOLUTIONS Dell s answers to the problem of tape-based backup, restore, and recovery are in the form of disk-based backup appliances: the PowerVault DL4000 with Dell AppAssure software and the PowerVault DR4100 along with complementary backup software applications such as AppAssure, NetVault and vranger or other leading backup software applications. The DL4000 and DR4100 appliances are optimized physical hardware appliances built to take on backup tasks for companies ranging in size from small, single location sites all the way up to multi-site data center enterprises. Easy, non-disruptive deployment means that you ll be using your appliance quickly. Many clients report rack up to backup times in less than one hour. BACKUP DONE RIGHT: THE DELL DR4100 BACKUP APPLIANCE Dell s DR family of disk-based backup appliances is compatible with the backup software you already have. Dell holds DMA/ISV certifications for the following backup products for use with the DR4100 backup appliance. Dell NetVault Dell vranger Dell AppAssure 4.7 CommVault Simpana Symantec Backup Exec Symantec NetBackup EMC Networker Veeam IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) CA ArcServe Oracle RMAN HP DataProtector Using the DR4100 disk-based backup appliance, you can automate your backups and your D2D2T workflows. The DR4100 can decrease your network utilization by as much as 95 percent and you ll find that your backup storage footprint can be reduced by as much as 94 percent. Plus, backup rates using the DR4100 together with Dell s NetVault Backup with RDA (Rapid Data Access) plug-in technology are up to 275 percent faster with ingest rates of up to 7.5TB per hour. And don t worry about killing your WAN connection for your remote backups. The DR4100 uses a WAN-aware and efficient, deduplicated replication for transfers of data between sites. 9

DEDUPLICATION DONE RIGHT Believe it or not, the old commercial real estate adage also holds true for deduplication: location, location, location. In other words, where your deduplication takes place matters a lot. Within the DR4100 solution, Dell uses variable block chunking, target-based, in-line deduplication and compression to deliver the best data compression ratios, the most time-efficient technology that presents the least amount of stress on your CPU resources so you can complete the backup jobs quickly and go back to work sooner. That s very good news for those of you running 24x7x365 businesses. Faster backup via targetbased, in-line deduplication gives you more opportunity to make your customers happy and provides you with a lower total cost of ownership for your technology investment. Although there are many arguments for target-based deduplication, you can configure the DR4100 for source deduplication as well for maximum flexibility in your environment. DISASTER RECOVERY DONE RIGHT Site-to-site data replication has never been easier nor has disaster recovery been less of a risk for you and your business. Automatic replication of data to a second DR4100 appliance located at your disaster recover site gives you the confidence that when disaster strikes, you ll be able to restore your data and return to productivity in minutes instead of days. 10

DELL DR 4100 FEATURES The DR4100 offers data reduction through deduplication and compression (15:1 ratio) Many-to-one replication for disaster recovery Flexible expandability options (9, 18, and 27TB) Up to 405TB logical capacity 2U form factor 10GbE connectivity Low TCO and maintenance Simplified, intuitive management Non-disruptive deployment Broad, integrated software support Multiple site support 11

BACKUP DONE RIGHT: THE DELL DL4000 BACKUP APPLIANCE The other backup to disk appliance from Dell is the PowerVault DL4000 - an integrated appliance which includes the server, storage and AppAssure software in one complete package. The DL4000 v1.1 is enabled by Dell AppAssure 5 software. The DL4000 comes in two configurations standard and high capacity. The Standard Edition is designed to back up as many as sixty (60) individual servers (physical and/or virtual) and the high capacity edition as many as 100 servers. Backup performance can be measured in at least three ways that impact customers businesses: RTO The DL4000 delivers a >60x increase in a Recover Time Objective (RTO) versus a recovery that typically takes an hour (60 minutes). RPO The DL4000 delivers a >250x increase in Recovery Point Objective (RPO) versus a backup that completes once (1) per day. Recovery Target In addition to multiple recovery methods that are part of the DL4000 using AppAssure software, the DL4000 can become an active part of a server infrastructure because it can host a VM of the most critical servers directly in the appliance. This included capability is called Virtual Standby made possible by the Microsoft Windows Hyper-V hypervisor that is included with the appliance. Note: Most customers require about five minutes to bring a virtual standby online. The DL4000 uses incremental forever snapshots along with Changed Block Tracking and smart agents to enable image-based clones of data to be taken at intervals of as little as five minutes or 288 times each day. In addition, the AppAssure software enables recovery time to be as little as one minute. Because of these frequencies, if a customer that says she performs one backup per day and it takes 120 minutes to recover data or a server could calculate improvements as follows: RPO improvement = # of current backups per day/288 o 1 backup per day/288 equals 288x improvement RTO improvement = # of minutes to recovery/1 o 120 minutes to recover/1 equals 120x improvement Recovery target improvement = # of minutes to complete a full server restoration/5 o 120 minutes to restore/5 equals 24x improvement The DL4000 appliance can accommodate MD1200 expansion shelves so that the standard editions can scale up to 45 TB in usable storage capacity or high capacity editions can expand to accommodate 85TB in usable back-end storage (this is capacity measured AFTER deduplication and compression have taken place.) 12

DATA PROTECTION AND DEDUPLICATION DONE RIGHT The DL4000 Backup Appliance protects your data and the entire application stack for all protected servers. And it reduces your backup footprint with integrated, inline block-level deduplication and compression, combined with optimized backups for WAN replication. The deduplication and compression processes occur at ingest to reduce your incremental snapshot sizes. DISASTER RECOVERY DONE RIGHT The DL4000 handles your disaster recovery plan with flexibility. Your backup images of protected data and application stack are stored on the AppAssure core software within the DL4000 and your deduplicated, compressed images are replicated to a disaster recovery location: virtual, physical, or cloud. Because the appliance is powered by AppAssure, it benefits from the Recovery Assure feature which virtually mounts application and data on a nightly basis, to ensure both your data and your applications can be recovered in the event of a disaster. And in case of a server or application failure event, the appliance uses AppAssure Live Recovery to enable near instantaneous access to critical business data, while the full rebuild occurs in the background. Finally, using AppAssure Universal Recovery, lets you use the DL4000 to recover from a virtual, physical, or cloud image to any environment, including bare metal restore. The DL4000 is powered by Microsoft s Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. Using Hyper-V s virtualization technology, the DL4000 provides a Virtual Standby feature that let s you create Virtual Machines within the appliance that can be used for full copies of your protected servers operating systems, applications, and data. The standby VMs can be immediately powered on to provide near zero downtime for your most critical applications and services. A standby VM is kept in sync with its source server via the AppAssure snapshot backups. 13

DELL DL4000 FEATURES 5.5TB usable capacity RAID6 storage Preconfigured with AppAssure software Expand licensed capacity to 10, 20, 40, 60, or 80TB using Dell PowerVault MD1200 expansion shelves In-line, block level deduplication and compression Optimized backups for WAN replication Easy wizard-based setup and storage provisioning Factory installed Windows Server 2012 operating system Designed for business resiliency Optimized and configured for efficiency and maximum value Image level snapshots for RPO and RTO measured in minutes Recovery Assurance Disaster recovery powered by virtual standby technology Turnkey data protection For the DL4000 the solution uses AppAssure global, in-line, block-based deduplication and compression technology which can reduce the amount of data backed up by as much as 80%. 14

CONCLUSION THINK IN THE BOX FOR BACKUP TO DISK EFFICIENCY Dell s disk-based backup appliances (DL4000 and DR4100) bring you the best available technologies to help minimize downtime due to backup and restore failures, decrease network bandwidth requirements for replication, rapidly restore files locally or to remote sites, ultimately lowering your backup, restore, and disaster recovery strategy TCO. Dell s appliances are easy to deploy and to use. They make your return to productivity as pain-free as possible after a disaster. Disk-based backup appliances make automated backups simple and reliable with integrity checking and multiple recovery points. The appliances also minimize your overall backup volume footprint, which saves you money by preventing storage sprawl and eliminates the need to purchase additional backup storage to meet data growth requirements. Dell s disk-based backup appliances are fast, affordable backup, restore, and recovery solutions with the future built in. About Dell Software Dell Software: Delivering complete and connected solutions Dell Software empowers organizations of all sizes to experience Dell s power to do more by delivering scalable yet simple-to-use solutions that can increase productivity, responsiveness and efficiency. Dell Software is uniquely positioned to address today s most pressing business and IT challenges with holistic, connected software offerings across five core solution areas, encompassing data center and cloud management, information management, mobile workforce management, security and data protection. This software, when combined with Dell hardware and services, helps customers simplify IT, mitigate risk and accelerate business results. www.dellsoftware.com. 15