VERITAS NetBackup Professional 3.5

VERITAS NetBackup Professional 3.5 Centralized Backup and Simplified Recovery for Distributed Client Data V E R I T A S W H I T E P A P E R

Table of Contents Executive Summary............................................................................................. 1 Introduction.................................................................................................... 2 VERITAS NetBackup Professional: Protecting Clients Anywhere in the Enterprise........................................7 Summary......................................................................................................10

Executive Summary With the proliferation of desktop computers, home offices, remote offices and mobile systems, critical corporate data now resides outside the traditional bounds of corporate IT responsibility. Studies show that as much of 60% of a corporation s data resides outside of its managed servers, on desktops and mobile systems. IT departments face the not uncommon dilemma of having to take responsibility for desktop and remote client data over which they have little actual control. Both statistics and common experience show that end users rarely maintain consistent backups of their own data. Data on desktops and mobile workstations can be enormously valuable to an organization. It can be the result of hours or weeks of work, and replacing it may be impossible. Worse yet, a slow recovery can cost days of lost productivity. Mobile users need easy, fast backups and simplified, rapid recoveries of their critical data, even if recovering to a completely new system. VERITAS NetBackup Professional is a comprehensive backup and recovery solution for client systems, designed specifically for the needs of the remote and mobile workstations that drive critical, field-based operations. VERITAS NetBackup Professional gives IT departments a perfect tool to manage and automate distributed backups to a centralized repository in a highly scalable architecture. For users, NetBackup Professional facilitates fast, easy backups and online recovery, from anywhere in the world, over dial-up or network connections. Using NetBackup Professional, organizations have a total backup and recovery solution that protects client data anywhere in the enterprise. Page 1

Introduction Protecting corporate data was a straightforward job when all data business resided on data center storage, which fell squarely into the realm of an operational support group. Today, however, with laptops, home and remote offices, mobile devices, distributed servers and corporate data centers, the lines of responsibility are far more blurred. Nowhere is that problem more acute than in the issue of backup and recovery. Where does IT s responsibility end does it include the PCs on all desktops, all laptops used in transit, and all home offices as well? And how can IT manage that data when it is beyond the scope of central networks? Inconsistent backup coverage Some organizations have implemented backup products that automatically back up desktop systems or synchronize desktop files that users leave on and that are connected to the corporate network. But this doesn t handle systems that are not on the corporate intranet, which may include remote offices, home offices and laptops. This strategy results in rapid growth of the back end data repository without offering a complete disaster recovery solution. Other organizations require that users periodically connect to the corporate intranet and copy files manually to a centrally managed file server. 1. The manual approach means few users follow the procedure and even fewer do it consistently. 2. The lack of management controls makes server capacity unpredictable and planning nearly impossible. 3. Network administrators must scramble to find and restore lost files, often requiring days to do so, if able to locate them at all. 4. In the end, these ad hoc procedures are at best a bandage, at worst give a false sense of security of a corporation s most valuable asset, data. Difficult recovery In either situation, users need to work with IT or MIS staff to recover files when there is a problem, either through an accidental file deletion, a system corruption, or a hardware failure. A complete recovery can take hours or days to perform. Until now, there have been few solutions for helping IT protect the availability and recoverability of data in the expanding enterprise. That leaves organizations with considerable risk exposure. VERITAS NetBackup Professional was designed to address this specific problem. This paper discusses the risks and challenges of remote and desktop client backups. It then explains how the NetBackup Professional solution from VERITAS Software resolves these issues by addressing the needs of the end user and of corporate IT departments while reducing an organization s overall exposure to risk. Assessing the Risks to Distributed Data Few organizations are untouched by the expanding quantity of distributed data that fall outside of traditional IT boundaries. To make matters worse, most companies today have an ever growing population of desktop and laptop computer systems. IDC estimates that the United States' mobile- and remote-user population will increase at a 9 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) from 39 million in 2000 to 55 million in 2004. With this increase in computers comes an increase in business critical data. As more of these computers are remote and mobile, that data exists outside the safety of corporate walls. Page 2

This growing amount of distributed data is vulnerable to a wide variety of risks. 15% of hard disk drives fail during their warranty period. Board Watch reports that over 200,000 laptops are stolen annually. The value of the hardware averages $1.4 billion, while the value of the data on average amounts to $15 billion. Research by Strategic Research Corporation finds that only 18% of more than 200 surveyed sites actually back up their workstations. For those that do perform workstation backups, only 12% of PCs were backed up regularly. One could argue that, since the system users are the ones primarily affected, they should take responsibility for performing backups, either to central storage or to a local peripheral such as a tape or Zip drive. That would rightly make the individuals most affected by data loss responsible for preventing it. If that attitude actually exists in a company, senior management is likely oblivious to the problem, IT management wishes they could fix it, the network support staff is unlikely to address it, and corporate users are better off not knowing about it. This is dangerous. Corporate desktops, remote offices, and mobile systems contain the daily work that drives the organization, including letters, contracts, memos, and other information that is essential to the day-to-day productivity of the company. In fact, in many cases the people using laptop systems are among the most valuable knowledge workers senior executives, key sales personnel, and others. A data loss affecting a CEO s laptop can be costly in terms of data and competitive positioning. The files on these systems may represent not only hours but also days, weeks or months of work, negotiation, and collaboration. The loss of this information can be disastrous. The corporation faces a two-fold risk. If data is lost, valuable information may take days to reconstruct, or be lost altogether. Even if the data can be recovered, a difficult and time-consuming recovery can mean lost sales, reduced productivity, and missed opportunities. It is not enough that the data is backed up; users also need to be able to recover from problems quickly and easily. The answer lies in a data protection solution that offers company-wide benefits, is simple to deploy and operate, automatically protects desktop systems, complements the existing server data protection strategy, and actually reduces administration time. The Challenge Organizations need a desktop and remote backup and recovery solution that meets the following high-level goals: Requirements for a Distributed Client Backup/Recovery Solution Centralized management and protection of distributed data with minimal drain on IT staff and resources. Rapid recovery from a wide variety of failures. Flexibility to provide access to backups for mobile and distributed workstation and laptop users of all ability levels. This will allow users to perform restores on their own, as long as the solution is as automated and easy as possible, and must support both network and dial-up connections of varying quality. Impossible? Not any more. Until recently, implementing an effective laptop and desktop data protection strategy has been difficult, if not impossible. Page 3

Inconsistent or intermittent connections to the corporate network Executives or sales staff using laptops and home-based offices may connect to the corporate intranet only intermittently. Any backup scheme that requires a high performance, secure connection to corporate resources is only partially useful for these people. If a salesperson on the road for a week drops a laptop on the way back to the office, a week s worth of critical customer data may be lost. Low bandwidth or low quality connections For home-based or traveling systems, dial-up access may be the only alternative for connecting to the corporate repository. But most remote backup solutions cannot support dial-in access. Dial-in connections are flawed by relatively low bandwidth and unpredictable quality. In this situation, backups must be rapid, inherently secure (since the data is traveling over unknown connections), and restartable in the case of an error. Wide range of recovery scenarios The purpose of any backup solution is to enable a fast recovery in case of problems. The solution must account for a wide range of possible recovery scenarios, including: Accidental loss, deletion or corruption of an individual file or set of files System corruption due to improper software installation or a virus Hard drive failure The complete loss or destruction of the system itself The solution must be able to support everything from individual file recovery to a so-called bare metal restore to new hardware. Recoveries must be user-directed and managed. A remote user cannot depend on a corporate MIS person to come out to their location and fix everything. MIS, always strapped for resources, requires a solution that can access remote users machines and repair major problems, where required, from a central console. Enormous quantities of data When considering the total volume of the data distributed on desktop computers, laptops and mobile systems, scalability quickly becomes an issue. Not only are there hundreds or thousands of users systems to manage, but each system may contain a gigabyte or more of data. Simply replicating all of this information centrally will create an ongoing storage nightmare and introduce significant network bandwidth problems. Imagine 1,000 users each backing up MS Office at 200MB each. That s 200GB s of redundant data! A better solution is to use intelligent software to identify the unique set of data on each system, and to only back up that data instead of the entire system. Some network backup products may address one or two of these challenges, but few address them all. VERITAS NetBackup Professional was purposefully designed to manage backups of distributed and remote clients Technology Making Client Protection a Reality The product has three main components: The NetBackup Professional Server accepts connections from clients and manages the backup database. The NetBackup Professional Server may run on Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows NT 4 (Service Pack 4,5,6) and Solaris 2.7, 2.8. The Administration Console allows for centralized management and configuration of multiple servers. Administrators configure and distribute client software centrally and create CD images for bare metal restores. The client software, installed on every client, schedules and performs automated backups and connects with the NetBackup Professional Server for recovery. Page 4

NetBackup Professional works so well over low bandwidth situations in part because it writes the smallest possible amount of information to backup. Much of the data residing on distributed workstations is actually identical: the latest version of Microsoft Office, for example, or a recent memo from the president. NetBackup Professional maintains a database of common or shared files. Instead of backing up 1000 copies of an application or document, it writes it just once to the database and makes a logical backup of the rest, pointing to the shared copy. By backing up only the unique files on each system, NetBackup Professional significantly reduces backup times and volumes. The initial full backup of a system is typically managed by a transfer of less than 10% of the total size of the protected file system. Using the latest in technology even open files are protected by NetBackup Professional. An additional benefit is the reduced time it takes to recover a NetBackup Professional Server, should it fail, as there is far less data that needs to be restored. WAN Administration (Web Console) Internet Explorer 4 Netscape Navigator 6 Administration (Windows Console) Windows 2000 Windows NT 4 Windows XP LAN Windows 95/ Windows 98 Windows XP Windows Millennium Edition Windows NT/2000 Solaris Servers Clients Remote Clients Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4 Workstation Windows XP Windows Millennium Edition Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4 Workstation Windows 95/ Windows 98 On subsequent backups, NetBackup Professional applies an incremental backup to write only changed data. This further reduces the time and volume of the backup. The client software optionally encrypts and compresses all backups before sending them to the NetBackup Professional Server. The server combines the changes, so the latest version of the file is complete and data integrity is ensured; NetBackup Professional stores a reverse delta copy to provide earlier versions of the files. It was very important to us to give the end user all necessary tools to independently restore data. By integrating with Microsoft Explorer, we have reduced the learning curve for end users and have made file selection as easy as possible for restore. In addition, data integrity in Windows 2000 environments is assured through the backup of alternate data streams as well as primary data streams. Page 5

NetBackup Professional Clients Supported Operating Environments: Windows XP Windows ME Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT 4 Workstation Windows 98 Windows 95 Windows 2000 Professional NetBackup Professional Server Single Instance Store Bare Metal Restore from CD-ROM Supports 10,000 users Supported Operating Environments: Windows 2000 Server Windows 2000 Advanced Server Windows NT 4 Server Solaris 2.7 and 2.8 Windows NT 4 Workstation WAN/ LAN Workgroup or Enterprise Remote Clients Transmit changed blocks only User-driven recovery Single-file or complete restore Encrypted and compressed data NetBackup Professional Clients Dial-up connection Windows 95/98 Windows XP/ Windows Millennium Edition Internet connection To support a bare metal restore, the administrator creates a bootable rescue disk or CD and a unique recovery CD for each system. Administrators can furnish these resources in advance or supply them on demand when an emergency happens. Taken together, the CD and disk, once required, give the user the capability to perform a complete system recovery, even from a new system. The user boots the system from the CD or disk, runs the recovery CD, and then connects to the Media Server to update files. The total recovery is fast and simple, and easily managed by the end user without MIS support. VERITAS NetBackup Professional addresses the needs of the end users, the IT department, and the organization as a whole in today s expanding enterprise. Page 6

VERITAS NetBackup Professional: Protecting Clients Anywhere in the Enterprise While some backup software vendors have tried to retrofit their products to support remote and mobile clients, NetBackup Professional was built with these most challenging requirements in mind. NetBackup Professional is the most scalable solution available for client backup in the enterprise, and is the only one that allows fast and secure backups and recoveries over low bandwidth or low quality network or dial-up connections. Summary of Overall Business Benefits: Corporate Laptop and Desktop Data Protection IT Benefits Administrator Benefits User Benefits Automatically protects corporate data assets on all workstations Reduces the total cost of ownership for all workstations Complements existing server data protection strategy and procedures Improves manageability over other current approaches Easily deployed and policy-managed from a single, central console for single or multiple server installations Eliminates administrator time required to find and restore individual files and entire systems Provides continuous, unobtrusive data protection and availability Enables self-initiated restores using Microsoft Windows Explorer Ensures complete disaster recovery and data integrity Simplifying Backup and Enabling Fast Recovery for End Users NetBackup Professional was written with the needs of a diverse community of end users in mind. Daily system snapshots NetBackup Professional lets users schedule automatic backups when they are connected to the network. Users connecting only intermittently or through dial-up lines can perform manual backups quickly and easily. In either case, the NetBackup Professional client software connects to the NetBackup Professional Server to create an online snapshot of the current system. This records the system s information as of the current date, writing new unique files and changed data to the repository. Having a consistent snapshot lets users recover files or the entire system to a specific day s state. Fast, restartable backups Because it only writes changed data on backup and compresses all transmissions, the backup is very fast and efficient to perform. If the backup is interrupted, which is usually caused by unstable communication links, it resumes where it left off once the connection is restored. Self-service recovery If users need to restore one or more files, they can do so from anywhere, over phone lines or networked connections. They can do so at any time of the day or night, without the assistance of IT staff. The self-directed, 7 x 24-recovery model suits users expectations for continuous service. Page 7

Bare metal restore Users can restore their entire system using the recovery CD created by the backup administrator to boot the system and bring it up to date. This restores all data files, program files and personal settings, so they can be back and running quickly. File exclusion Even though the backup is inherently secure, with encrypted transmission and a secured repository users can also choose to exclude specific files from backups, either for security reasons, or to prevent backups of temporary data. A Scalable, Manageable Solution for IT VERITAS NetBackup Professional lets IT departments protect distributed data without burdening individual users with difficult backup tasks and without draining IT or MIS resources. Scalability NetBackup Professional is doubtlessly the most scalable solution on the market for remote client backups. Our testing facility has shown that NetBackup Professional with its new proprietary database can support more than 10,000 clients per day. NetBackup Professional s single instance storage, in which common files on each system are only stored once, typically reduces disk storage requirements for the data repository by up to 90% when there are more than 1,000 users on a server. To free up disk space over the life of the solution use data migration to migrate older or infrequently used data from the disk repository to tape. The client calculates the backup set and compresses the data, freeing server resources to manage more concurrent backups. A throttle feature lets IT staff limit the number of concurrent backups to maximize network efficiency. If one adds many new clients to the system at once, the client software can write the initial backup offline and send the information to the administrator, reducing network load startup. Support for multiple NIC cards and additional processors enable organizations to scale as organizations grow. Centralized management An easy to use, Windows NT-based graphical interface or web-based console facilitates centralized backup management, from distributing client software to creating recovery CDs and centralized reporting. From a single machine on the network, you may deploy the client software to the desired amount of Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows XP clients. Client profiles allow the administrator to group users into logical categories, protect specific types of data, and assign specific schedules and priorities. Any number of users can be grouped or assigned to a profile to simplify configuration and deployment. Profiling establishes client protection policies that deliver uniform and automated protection without additional administrator or user action. Administrators have profilelevel control over user rights regarding user-initiated backups and restores and the ability to exclude certain files or file types from the backup process. Easy to use wizards provide step-by-step instructions for administrators. The management console provides a centralized view of multiple servers, management of client profiles, and the status and operation of each NetBackup Professional Server (or backup data repository), including load balancing and scheduling of the backup window. The console gives administrators control over all client machines and NT repositories and serves as the monitor and reporting station for the statistics on the amount and type of user data being protected on each client, client group or entire installation. Page 8

Administration and Reporting Armed with effective tools for monitoring and reporting the protection status of the enterprise, the IT staff can make timely decisions about protection-related parameters such as storage capacity requirements, backup scheduling, user or group profiles, protection status of individual or group, and much more. Trending features provide a visual gauge for administrators to view the rate at which their server repository is growing, so they may proactively monitor and plan their storage requirements. Integration with the most popular report generator, Crystal Reportsª simplifies the analysis and reporting of client data on the server. Integration within the enterprise NetBackup Professional integrates well into almost any information architecture: NetBackup Professional clients can be easily deployed across a variety of desktop and notebook systems. NetBackup Professional supports Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows NT 4 (Service Pack 4,5,6), Solaris 2.7, 2.8 and industry-standard hardware platforms, so it can integrate easily into an existing IT infrastructure. Compared with alternatives that manage backups manually or use other vendors distributed backup products, VERITAS NetBackup Professional is the most cost-effective solution available. This is in part because of its tremendous scalability. Since it supports more clients with a smaller repository, NetBackup Professional is both easier and less expensive to implement than alternatives. Page 9

Summary An Integrated Solution from Leader in the Data Availability Business VERITAS NetBackup Professional will easily integrate as part of a corporate data protection and disaster recovery strategy with the other leading solutions from its product family, VERITAS NetBackup and VERITAS Backup Exec. Unlike partial approaches to solving the client data protection dilemma, such as ad hoc manual procedures or OS-based backup applets with file mirroring, VERITAS NetBackup Professional offers significant advantages including: Centralized administration Intelligent data elimination resulting in reduced storage requirements Policy-based operation Superior automation and flexibility Advanced planning, analysis and reporting High performance and scalability Complementation of any enterprise data protection strategy Cost-effectiveness Inhouse management and security compliant with corporate policies VERITAS NetBackup Professional is the latest addition to the industry s most comprehensive and widely used suite of storage management products. From the desktop to the enterprise, VERITAS delivers superior storage, network and information management products that benefit business, IT operations and corporate users, backed up by one of the most effective service infrastructures in existence. Page 10

VERITAS Software Corporation Corporate Headquarters 350 Ellis Street Mountain View, CA 94043 650-527-8000 or 800-327-2232 For additional information about VERITAS Software, its products, or the location of an office near you, please call our corporate headquarters or visit our Web site at V E R I T A S W H I T E P A P E R Copyright 2001 VERITAS Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. Printed in USA. November 2001. 90-20088-399