NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup

WHITE PAPER NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup

Protecting Microsoft and VMware Executive Summary 3 Microsoft and VMware Backup Challenges 3 Server Virtualization 3 Data Explosion 3 Architectural Backup Pain Points 4 Deduplication is Not Enough 5 Deduplication Benefits 5 Deduplication is Not Enough 5 Backup Pain Points 5 NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup Solution 6 Evaluate your Windows and VMware Data Protection Needs 8 NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 2

Executive Summary Are you faced with increasing costs to protect your data? Can you quickly and reliably recover key applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange or SharePoint? Are virtualization and explosive data growth making you evaluate new data protection solutions? You are not alone. Many organizations are struggling with decades old technologies that are fundamentally incapable of dealing with the variety of today s data protection needs. Architecturally, traditional backups are inefficient resulting in high impact backup and forcing customers to use point solutions in order to achieve faster restores while breaking today s flat or declining IT budgets. Coupled with massive data growth, disruptive server virtualization technologies and stringent recovery service level agreements, IT organizations are pressed to reevaluate their data protection strategy. NetApp and Syncsort have partnered to deliver a cost effective, next generation backup and disaster recovery solution to protect physical and virtual environments, protecting all data and storage types, delivering advanced recovery capabilities and preserving tape investments, all while reducing the total cost of ownership. Microsoft and VMware Backup Challenges In today s economy, competitive pressures are pushing organizations to enhance their core business competencies more than ever before. In order to keep pace with a technology-driven modern economy, flexible IT has become an essential element for business success. Applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and VMware have increased in importance to serve a wide range of critical business functions including communication, knowledge management, collaboration and day-to-day operational activities. However, the rapid rate of application deployments and the sheer amount of data has created significant backup challenges and increased the cost of data protection. Server Virtualization Server virtualization has brought significant innovation to help increase efficiency, business agility and lowering overall hardware costs. Packaging a complete server, including hardware, operating system, applications and configurations into a portable virtual machine has become the new game. Virtualization allows for lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of hardware resources, higher energy savings, better management and increased availability. Every organization is looking to achieve those goals so virtualization has become a priority. Server virtualization created a wave of storage centralization and a new level of efficiency but generated a side effect where traditional backup architectures are no longer effective. Traditional backup methods place a significant resource load on VMware servers resulting in extended backup windows and reduced performance for critical applications when backups are running. Placing a traditional agent on a physical server was rarely a challenge before, so why is it a problem now? The answer lies with resource contention. Because virtualization can make a single physical server act like multiple logical servers, server utilization increased from 10-15 percent to 80 percent. At the same time, backup operations demand significant processing power that often compromises the performance of virtual machines constraining the VMware host server s CPU, memory, I/O, and network components and make it difficult to protect data within available windows. This situation is forcing customers to re-architect their data protection and disaster recovery solutions. Data Explosion The data protection market today is in a state of a transition. The core of the problem is the intersection of data growth and virtualization that has created a perfect storm to break traditional backup. While customers were upgrading infrastructures to take advantage of faster processors, networks speeds and data transfer rates, the data kept increasing. Structured data grew as business processes were computerized. End user productivity applications like word processing and spreadsheets reached every desktop and unstructured data increased exponentially. New virtual machines became a convenience, e-mail became the primary means of communicating, and while tape drives became faster, their sequential nature limited backup performance. Disk backup and NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 3

deduplication technologies have helped, but even midsize organizations face a broader set of data protection challenges including Disaster Recovery. Architectural Backup Pain Points Every customer environment consists of production environment and the infrastructure to protect that data. We have identified four architectural pain points that result in poor performance and excessive costs: 1. High Impact and Resource Intensive Backup The production environment includes primary storage as well as physical and virtual application servers which protect data files into a complex backup infrastructure. But in order to know which files to move, a traditional backup solution must read and move the same data multiple times. In fact, in a typical week, customers end up moving over 160% of production storage. Moreover, certain applications may complete a full backup every night, moving 700% of application data every week! This creates massive inefficiencies as we are asking our production application systems to spend critical compute cycles reading and moving the same data, doing work that has already been done. The problem worsens in virtual environments where hardware resources are shared, and extra CPU cycles are at a premium. As a result, with more data to backup, backup times are extended in this inefficient backup model causing administrative challenges. 2. Multiple Backup Solutions With the increase in server virtualization and explosive data growth many users are forced to deploy multiple backup products. Industry analysts indicate that the typical customer uses three solutions to backup physical servers, virtual servers, remote offices, operating system data, specific applications (e.g. SharePoint), tape backup, replication, disaster recovery, and so on. Multiple solutions are more costly as they require more training, administration and a complex backup infrastructure. This complexity results in higher backup costs and a higher total cost of ownership. 3. Backup Images Stored Inefficiently For years, organizations have been using tape as their primary backup medium which has recently transitioned to long-term storage while VTL s and dedupe appliances have grown in popularity. In traditional backup, data is stored in a proprietary sequential format. Before it can be used for recovery, it must be transformed into a useable format which increases restore time. The limitations and drawbacks of tape as a recovery media are well known: it is slow, easily damaged, and may need to be retrieved from an offsite location before recovery can even begin. This can add hours or even days to recovery time certainly not enough to meet the aggressive recovery needs demanded by businesses today. Storing data on VTLs or other disk systems can help, but recovery is inefficient and involves moving large amounts of data from point A to point B. These traditional methods of storing data Figure 1: Four architectural backup pain points. Production Data Protection Storage Physical & VM App Servers Backup Servers VTL or Tape DR Site High Impact, Inefficient Multiple BU Products Slow Restore Complex, Costly Production Data Protection NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 4 Physical & VM Storage NSB DR Site App Servers

result in lengthy recovery windows that often fail to meet the demands of the business. 4. Complex Disaster Recovery Disaster Recovery processes are often resource intensive and involve manual shipment and loading of tapes before recovery can even start. Many different products and service providers can be involved adding a layer of complexity. Because traditional backup software is not always well suited for DR purposes, organizations commonly have separate products in place for DR. These can include array-based replication, independent software or appliances that serve only to transmit data from one location to another. Due to the complexity and the impact involved many organizations are challenged to adequately test and validate their DR strategy. Some may manage it once a year, while others avoid it altogether. This exposes their organizations to excessive corporate risks. The bottom line is that customers need next generation data protection and disaster recovery that is cost effective, simple to implement and easy to manage, enabling them to focus on critical areas of their business. Deduplication is Not Enough In order to deal with increasing pressures of data growth on backup windows, customers started implementing a new strategy for backup processes backup to disk. Disk backup initially seemed to solve many problems, but data quantities made it cost prohibitive. Even though hard drive prices trended lower, disk was still more costly per gigabyte than tape. The nature of file backup exacerbated the problem, as file backup is resource intensive and inefficient. It copies the same content over and over again and stores large quantities of redundant data. The concept of deduplication was formed to reduce data storage needs and collapsed backup storage up to 90 percent or more. What used to take 100 Terabytes to store now took only 10 or 15 Terabytes. Deduplication Benefits Deduplication makes disk-based backup economically feasible and it lets users reduce or even eliminate the use of tape. Because customers can now store weeks and even months of backups on disk economically, tape becomes expendable for anyone without long term retention needs. Replication transfers data off-site to a second device, eliminating the need for mobile media and truck transport and storage costs are lowered significantly. Deduplication Is Not Enough With deduplication technology such a success, why is backup still broken? Because deduplication solved only one part of a more complex problem. Deduplication does not address challenges on the production side, since the same file-based backups are still run. The number of backup servers or separate products that you need is unchanged. And maybe most importantly, it does not fundamentally change the recovery methodology. Data still needs to be transformed back into a useable format and streamed back to a target. It may be marginally faster than a tape device (not in all cases), but it may still take hours for a large volume to be recovered. Deduplication is necessary but it alone does not address the full spectrum of customer problems. Backup Pain Points In addition to architectural challenges, users are expressing frustration at ever increasing costs for solutions that no longer meet the demands of IT because they are overwhelmed by data growth rates and the impact of virtualization. We have divided the landscape up into five major categories, based on commonly expressed user needs derived from many individual discussions and industry analysts. These key needs are: 1. Eliminate the Backup Window: Backups take too long to complete. Extreme data growth on the order of 50% a year is driving this problem and traditional backup technologies cannot keep pace. 2. Faster Recovery: More and more organizations are insisting on recovery SLAs because downtime costs are so high. Yet IT organizations are challenged to deliver with legacy backup solutions. 3. Unified Protection: To compensate for traditional backup software deficiencies, users are implementing multiple solutions and point products to solve specific issues. The need is for a single solution to work equally well in both physical and virtual worlds, to protect all types of data including file, operating system, SAN and DAS. 4. Simplified Disaster Recovery: DR is often too complex and untested placing unnecessary risk on the business. DR often involves a separate product beyond the solutions already in place. The key needs for effective DR are simplicity, reliability and affordability to IT organizations of all sizes. NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 5

5. Reduced Cost and Complexity: Users are spending over $6 billion a year on data protection, yet they lack confidence they can recover when needed and remain challenged to meet their backup windows. Product proliferation adds tremendously to hard costs such as licensing and maintenance fees and soft costs such as excessive administrative time managing and troubleshooting multiple, unreliable backup systems. NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup Solution Customers require a next generation data protection solution that keeps pace with server virtualization and exploding data growth while addressing all backup pain points at a cost effective price point. And that is what defines NetApp Syncsort Production Integrated Backup (NSB). NSB combines Syncsort and NetApp software with NetApp high performance disk storage, Physical offering & VM customers a Backup revolutionary Storage change in data App protection. Servers It uses snapshot Servers technology to reduce backup time and storage consumption by 90 percent and is a single integrated backup and DR solution for disk and tape. NSB protects key applications while reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency. How does NSB address the Microsoft and VMware backup challenges we discussed earlier? Unlike traditional backup solutions, and unlike data deduplication products that only address a single High Impact, problem, NSB is a true end-to-end Inefficient solution with a comprehensive design strategy that yields the following results: Multiple BU Products 1. Fast and efficient backup By design, NSB implements source side data reduction that reads and moves data only once, dramatically reducing backup time and server resources by 90 percent or more. NSB does not scan the file system to determine changed data, but rather performs one full, initial base backup, after which it transfers only block level incremental updates. By moving data once, backups become much faster and users can back up more often, increasing recovery point objectives. While this is vital for any application, it is especially important in virtual environments where physical resources are shared and there are far fewer cycles available for backup processing. By limiting the impact of backup, NSB accelerates virtualization while eliminating backup Data windows. Protection 2. Fast and efficient recovery The value VTL or of Tape data has never been DR Site greater and organizations need to back up fast and recover even faster. As a next generation data protection solution, NSB addresses this problem in another design strategy storing data intelligently. This has two benefits: NSB stores backups as usable snapshots. NSB uses industry leading Slow NetApp snapshot Complex, technology. By storing data Restore as snapshots, data Costly can be recovered immediately and accessed by end-users in minutes with just two mouse clicks, regardless of size. Figure 2: NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup simplifes architecture and solves problems end-to-end. Production Data Protection Storage Physical & VM App Servers NSB DR Site Near Zero Impact Move Data Once Store Smart, Instant Recovery, One Solution Easy to Use Cost Effective NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 6

Snapshot technology also allows data to be shared with multiple users for multiple purposes testing, development, reporting, data mining and so on. Reduce storage consumption. NSB data reduction technology eliminates enormous amounts of duplicate data created by traditional backup. Then it adds to that efficiency by deduplicating and compressing backups to maximize storage efficiency. 3. Simplicity and ease of use NSB removes the backup server layer by writing data directly to NetApp storage simplifying the data protection design. It reduces cost and complexity, provides enhanced performance by eliminating bottlenecks, and delivers greater reliability by removing potential points of failure. The result is a data protection solution with 99 percent backup success rates which lowers management costs significantly. NSB also integrates disaster recovery via NetApp SnapMirror, a thin replication solution for complete protection. A single solution, simple design and less moving parts results in easier administration and use with a superior TCO. 4. Cost effective NSB offers the best TCO and drives cost savings across multiple dimensions: Snapshots reduce backup times and storage consumption by 90% Integrated DR and instant data recovery reduce downtime and improve operational efficiency. Consolidate point solutions. By protecting all types of data NSB eliminates point solutions for VM s, Bare Metal Recovery, tape and physical servers. Slash backup TCO by 50%. The largest hidden cost of backup is management, and much of that time is spent dealing with backup failures. NSB customers report success rates of 99% or more nearly eliminating backup troubleshooting. NSB modernizes data protection for the virtual age through fast, storage efficient, reliable backup that is easy to use and cost effective. It is designed specifically to eliminate the most common data protection problems and their associated costs. To summarize, every customer will be able to address all five backup pain points: 1. Eliminate Backup Window: NSB eliminates backup window issues by reading data only once, thereby reducing backup times 90% or more. 2. Faster Recovery: NSB gives you the fastest recovery by storing smart and using the power of snapshot technology to drive recovery in minutes. 3. Unified Protection: NSB is a single, unified solution for your physical and virtual servers, as well as for key applications, eliminating the need for multiple products. 4. Simplified Disaster Recovery: NSB integrates disaster recovery to make DR easy to manage and easy to test. 5. Reduce Cost and Complexity: By providing a truly unified combination of software and storage, NSB reduces costs across the board, providing the best return on investment. NSB Protect your Microsoft and VMware Environment with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup www.syncsort.com 7

Evaluate your Windows and VMware Data Protection Needs The following checklist will help you begin the process of assessing the needs of your current data protection solution: Customer Selection Criteria (Gartner, ESG) Description How Would you Rate Your Current Solution? R Y G Data Protection Eliminate backup window Backup in minutes not hours, with high success rates. Resource efficient backup Limits backup impact (CPU, I/O) to physical & virtual servers. Multiple daily recovery points Frequent backup for shorter RPO and limited data loss. Application awareness Create application consistent backups. Tape support Integrated movement of data from disk to tape. Data Reduction Data Reduction on Target Reducing amount of data stored on target disk via dedupe and compression. Data Reduction on Host Reduces disk and network I/O and data stored on disk. Data Recovery Instant Access Immediately access snapshot images Instant Virtualization Boot snapshot image as a new virtual machine. Bare Metal Recovery Restore a full physical server across hardware barriers File Level Catalog Searchable snapshot catalog to locate and restore files. Management Unified Management Console One console to reduce admin costs. NetApp and Syncsort have developed a team of qualified partners who can help you evaluate your data protection environment to identify goals specific to your business. These partners will work with you to create comprehensive data protection plans to meet your objectives, lower your costs, increase data availability, and take the risk out of disaster recovery. To learn more, contact your local NetApp-Syncsort value-added reseller or visit us at www.netapp.com or www.syncsort.com. About Syncsort Syncsort is a global software company that helps the world s most successful organizations rethink the economics of data. Syncsort provides extreme data performance and rapid time to value through easy to use data integration and data protection solutions. With over 15,000 deployments, Syncsort has transformed decision making and delivered more profitable results to thousands of customers worldwide. 50 Tice Boulevard, Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677 201.930.8200 www.syncsort.com 2011 Syncsort Incorporated. All rights reserved. NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup are trademarks of NetApp and Syncsort Incorporated respectively. NetApp is a registered trademark of NetApp, Inc. All other company and product names used herein may be the trademarks of their respective companies.. NSB03-004-0112US