OpenShift Commons Paris - Choose Your Own Observability Adventure
IT Backup & Restoration: Never Worry about a Late Backup Again
1. Never Worry about
a Late Backup Again
Virtual Tape Libraries:
Affordable, Reliable Data Protection
Brought to you by:
A /systems Company
2. A /systems Company
Chuck Losinski
Director of Automation Technology–Robot
Help/Systems
Never Worry about a Late Backup Again
Broadcasting live from Eden Prairie in Minnesota, USA
Glenn Haley
Sr. Product Manager / ISV Certification
Crossroads Systems, Inc.
3. A /systems Company
Today’s Agenda
Issues with IT and Backup/Restore
Being Prepared for the Inevitable
What Is and Why Use a VTL?
Summary / Closing Comments
Questions
8. A /systems Company
Create a Recovery Plan
1. Evaluate the cost and impact of downtime
2. Set goals and plan backup strategy to meet objectives (RPO/RTO)
3. Identify technology options and solutions
4. Implement technology / processes
5. Analyze and TEST the strategy and procedures
6. Adjust the strategy accordingly
Data Protection is an Evolving Landscape!
Data Backup Data Protection Data Recovery Management
Recovery is the Critical Thing!
9. A /systems Company
Know the downtime costs (per hour, day, two days...)
Lost Productivity
Lost Revenue
Damaged Reputation
Financial Performance
Other Expenses
Cost and Impact of Downtime
11. A /systems Company
Time
Recovery Point Objective
(RPO)
Restoration
MTTR– Time to
repair or ‘Downtime’
Offsite
Vaulted
Daily Backup
Complete
Synch
Point
Backup Prepare
Pickup
Daily Backup
Complete
Synch
Point
Backup Prepare
Pickup
Offsite
Vaulted
Weekly Backup
InComplete
Synch
Point
Backup Incident
DetectionIncident
Time
Detection
elapsed time
Diagnosis
Response Time
Repair Recovery
Repair time
Restoration
MTTR– Time to repair or ‘Downtime’
Incident
MTBF– Time between
failures or ‘uptime’
Recovery Time Objective
(RTO)
Recovery Objectives Explained
15. A /systems Company
• Information Availability
• Short Term Retention
• Use disk for daily backup
• Immediate data
availability
• Performance
• Faster backups, to meet
“backup windows”
• Even faster restores
• Information Retention
• Long Term Retention
• Cost effective capacity
• Removable &
transportable
• Disaster Recovery & Archive
• Meet financial & regulatory
requirements
• Data encryption, WORM
Disk vs. Tape … or Both?
16. A /systems Company
Source: IBM, IBM i Tape 101 for Storage folks, 2008 System Storage and Storage Networking Symposium
Shortening Backup on the IBM i
18. A /systems Company
Virtual Tape:
Tape emulated storage but using disk
Virtual Tape appears as a physical tape
Use of physical tape becomes an option
Supports existing tape processes
Supports Backup Applications and utilities
Shared among multiple host systems
Can scale and attach physical tape devices
Cost effective for near-line data storage
Improves operational efficiency
Reduces operational and media expenses
Virtual Tape Solution
Host
Server
Physical Tape Library
Virtual Tape
Library
Virtual Tape
Drive(s) and
cartridges
Virtual Tape
Appliance
What is a Virtual Tape Appliance?
19. A /systems Company
Source: ESG Research, VTL Adoption and Market Trends
Improve Recovery Performance
Ease of Deployment
Improve Backup Performance
Reduce/eliminate tape media
management issues
Ease of Management
Cost
Scalability
Feature Set
Maturity of Product/Market
Don’t Know
1. Improves reliability, integrity, and
performance of backup and recovery
2. Minimizes human, mechanical, and
media errors inherent with tape
3. Easily integrates into existing backups
without disruption to current policies
4. Avoids management burden of
continually performing storage
partitioning
5. Reduces operational expense to
manage backup environments
6. Solutions can scale to meet specific
data growth needs of business
7. Remote vaulting provides security
for older technology tape drives
Why use a VTL Solution?
20. A /systems Company
Host System
Connectivity
Single Stream
Performance
Disk-based
Backups
Physical Tape
Integration
Backup Application
Seamless Support
Scalable Storage &
Capacity Licensing
Event based
Automation
Remote
Replication
WAN
Data Reduction &
WAN Optimization
VTL Solution - What Features?
A /systems Company
21. A /systems Company
Flexible Host Connectivity
IBM i, AIX, Linux, Windows, and others
SCSI LVD, SAS, or FC connectivity types
Improve Performance
Faster than LTO4 single streaming rates
Multiple virtual drives and backup streams
Immediate access to restore data
Consolidate Physical Resources
Multiple hosts can share appliance
Mixed OS host types per appliance
Physical tape device/library consolidation
More efficient tape media usage
Disk-Based (Tapeless) Backups
22. A /systems Company
Flexible Emulation Formats
Virtual Tape Library (Ex. TS3500)
Virtual Tape Drive (Ex. Ultrium 3580)
No Disruption to Backup
Utilize defined classes & sets
Robot/SAVE, i5/OS SAVE, etc.
Optimized Tape Operations
Stacked Tape Export: Multiple virtual
cartridges written to tape saves media
Tape-Tape Native Export: Exact data
set/format that can be restored direct
Dynamic Import of Tapes
Create virtual tape of imported tape
Restore to host or refresh physical media
Integration – Backup and Tape Devices
A
23. A /systems Company
User-defined policies trigger events
Automates task handling without any interaction
Built-in scheduling for events
Initiates task handling based on date and time
Virtual pools help to manage media
Virtual cartridges can be assigned to a media pool
Each pool can have its own retention period
Virtual Tape as an alternate IPL device
Option 21 SAVES have never been easier
So, “Are you backing up the right stuff?”
Improve Operational Efficiency
24. A /systems Company
Expand Capacity with Multi-Options
“Pay as you Grow” with managed capacity licensing
Supports leading disk arrays for external storage
• IBM, HP, EMC, Hitachi, Xyratex, and others
Manage Object Growth
Create unlimited number of virtual cartridges
Single cartridge can virtually be an unlimited length
Virtual tape sizing eliminates wasted storage
Extend System Connectivity
Support multiple host systems and partitions
Flexible host connectivity options (SCSI, SAS, or FC)
Scalable and Extendable Resource
25. A /systems Company
Integrated Key Management
Full key management lifecycle
Encrypted key database
Access controls and user level privileges
Digital certificate-based authorization
Dedicated Encryption Appliance
Requires no changes to host server
On-the-fly or idle processing
Data on disk remains encrypted
Configured virtual pools and cartridges
AES-CBC-256 encryption
Offload w/ Tape Drive Encryption
Processing done by LTO4/5 encryption
Optionally pass key to physical tape device
Stacked Export
Host
Server
DiskVolume
Encrypted Virtual
Media Pool(s)
Virtual
Media Pool(s)
Native Export
(no encryption)
Key per
Virtual Tape
Encryption
Process
Compression
Media
pool
encrypted
?
AES 256
Encryption
KeyID & Data
written to virtual
tape (on disk)
Normal data
written to virtual
tape (on disk)
Yes
No
Data Encryption
Data Encryption
26. A /systems Company
Improves Recovery Time
Remote recovery can begin immediately
Deploy jointly or independently within
data center, campus or remote site
Optimizes Bandwidth
Replication calculates and transmits
only the changes in to remote site(s)
Bandwidth limit settings
Virtual tapes are synchronized to be
exact copies of original
WAN Acceleration (optional)
Secure Data Transfer
Transport packets are encrypted to
ensure secure transfer to remote site
❶ Primary Site
• User selected virtual tapes
(or pools of tape)
• Target site selection
(multi-site replication)
❷ Replication Site
• Delta changes to files transmitted
• Secure tunnel transfer
• Media pools at remote site(s)
contain tapes of local and remote
virtual tapes
• Physical tapes can be created at
remote site
Data Replication
Data Replication
27. A /systems Company
Capacity Optimization methods
Data Compression (Lempel-Ziv based)
• Block-based, tape friendly
Single Instance Storgae
• File-based, reduction by filename only
Data Deduplication (results vary on IBM i)
• File and block based, but not tape friendly
Improved Network Utilization*
Bandwidth limit settings (% of bandwidth)
Delta Differencing (transmit delta changes)
Data Deduplication (transmit delta changes)
WAN Optimization (low network overhead)
* When using Data Replication
Data Reduction Techniques
28. A /systems Company
Single Instance Storage
First application of deduplication
technology to storage
Limited results since reduction was
based solely on redundant file names
Fixed-size block Deduplication
Delivers superior compression
multipliers, but fails to tolerate byte
insertion into files
Variable-block Deduplication
Delivers good compression
multipliers, but is CPU-intensive and
cannot be application-aware because
of lack of control of block sizes
Data Deduplication Techniques
29. A /systems Company
Bandwidth Optimization
Any size file, network, or distance
300Mbps and 1Gbps license options
Maximizes data transfer and throughput
Highly Efficient, Low Overhead
Overcomes latency associated with TCP
Enables predictable transfer times
Up to 10-100x throughput improvements
Robust and Reliable Transfers
Automatic resumes and retry transfers
Network Congestion Control
Real-time policy-based bandwidth control
Enterprise Class Security
AES-128 Encryption of data in transit
SSH Authentication (System-System)
WAN Optimization
31. A /systems Company
Saves Money
Reduces Capital (CapEx) and Operational expenses (OpEx) overall
Consolidates number of tape devices and reduces media expense and usage
Centralizes your backup location while providing holistic data protection
Improves Efficiency
Improves recovery times significantly compared to the use of traditional tape
Eliminate media errors associated with mechanical drive and tape libraries
Reduce human intervention with automated events and task handling
Supports backup applications (i.e. Robot/SAVE) without disruption to processes
Reduces Risk
Reliable disk-based data protection with the option to use physical tape if desired
Data Encryption options help to secure data and satisfy regulatory compliance
Data Replication options automates disaster recovery protection to offsite storage
Scales to meet specific data growth within your business
Summary – Why VTL?
32. A /systems Company
Backup is necessary but “Recovery” is the Critical Thing!
Create a DR Plan to Meet Recovery Objectives (RPO/RTO)
Evaluate, Identify, Implement, TEST, and Reevaluate
You can “Do More With Less” resources using Virtual Tape!
Consider Crossroads for your Tier 2 or Tier 3 Needs
Closing Comments
33. A /systems Company
SPHiNX 1U-s (3TB, 6TB)
Host: SCSI, SAS , 4Gb FC
Tape: SCSI, SAS , 4Gb FC
IBM i; AIX; Linux; Windows
NonStop; ClearPath
SPHiNX 2U-s (6TB, 9TB, 12TB, 15TB)
Host: SCSI, SAS, 4Gb FC
Tape: SCSI, SAS, 4Gb FC
IBM i; AIX; Linux; Windows,
NonStop; ClearPath
SPHiNX 3U-s (15TB; 20TB; 25TB; 30TB, 35TB)
SPHiNX 3U-ns (External Disk required)
Host: SAS , 4Gb or 8Gb FC
Tape: SCSI, SAS, 4Gb or 8Gb FC
IBM i; AIX; Linux; Windows
NonStop; ClearPath
Crossroads SPHiNX
Holistic Data Protection – Virtual Tape
34. A /systems Company
Remote / Branch Office Main Site / Data Center Disaster Recovery Site
IBM i AIX Linux Windows
✇Enterprise Data Protection
Data protection for multi-host
connected systems providing
multiple virtual drives per host
✇ Disaster Recovery
Optional data replication to
second site for automated DR
✇ Consolidated Backup
Automated backup & replication
of remote sites to data center
✇ Integrated Tape
Leverage existing tape for
automated capacity offload
and data protection
Disk-based backup of local sites
that can be remotely managed
✇ Remote Office Protection
✇ Date Encryption
Secure media to satisfy
privacy laws and meet
regulatory compliance
Holistic Data Protection – Virtual Tape
38. A /systems Company
Chuck Losinski
Director of Automation Technology–Robot
Help/Systems
Questions?
Broadcasting live from Eden Prairie in Minnesota, USA
Glenn Haley
Sr. Product Manager / ISV Certification
Crossroads Systems, Inc.
39. A /systems Company
Thank you for joining us today!
Help/Systems:
www.helpsystems.com
Telephone:
800-328-1000 sales
952-933-0609 support
Presenter:
chuck.losinski@helpsystems.com
952-563-2790
Contact Information
Crossroads:
www.crossroads.com
Telephone:
866-289-2737 sales
512-349-0300 support
Presenter:
ghaley@crossroads.com
512-928-7515
Editor's Notes
Things to do before the show.1. Upload the presentation and lobby slides 15-20 minutes ahead of time.2. Change rights for attendees to only chat with panelist3. Change event options and get rid of Q&A4. Load up polling questions5. Auto Advance the lobby Slides6. Do audio checks very so often, talk about new features, new products, weather, kid sporting events, the Twins, etc. Ice fishing.There will be a moment of silence while I start the recording.
Share Poll Results at the end of this slide: Poll1Main problems faced are about managing the growth, forecasting, administration, and costs of storage!
Open Poll: DR PlanBackup is necessary but “Recovery” is the Critical Thing! 73% have a DR plan in place (or so they say).Best Practice Steps to creating a DR PlanEvaluate the costs of downtime in your environment!Set measurable goals for system and data recovery (RPO/RTO) based on your company’s needsHow much data loss, if any, is acceptable? How long can your business function without the data? How long can your production system be down during a restore? How much transaction time can be lost? How much budget is available for a recovery plan?Identify and implement technologies and processes that will meet these defined objectives effectivelyTest the strategy and procedures to ensure its execution, train staff appropriately, and evaluate inefficienciesReevaluate the strategy from time-to-time to ensure that your are continuing to sufficiently meet objectivesAccording to Storage Magazine, surveys from 2010 showed that 54% test their DR Plans, whereas now in 2012 only 47% test their DR Plans; and 21% test it only once year, and 24% test it whenever possible. Backup/Recoverymeans testing that both the backup is successful,but also that the recovery is successful!For many firms, the appropriate technologies for achieving their RTO/RPO are not in place.
DR capabilities have been viewed in the past as insurance policies against major natural or even manmade disasters. However there is also a more frequent threat of mini type of disasters that can have a significant impact such as power outages, maintenance and upgrades, corrupted files. A common trend that is occurring is that data loss is more of a concern than downtime. The longer the Recovery Time = Increased Operational Downtime = Further Loss of Revenue.Downtime is the sum total of the full recovery effort until the system and services are fully restored and operational.Downtime could be unplanned outages such as:- System crash, Natural disaster, Hardware problems, Data loss, Data corruption, Power failure, Human error**********************************************************************************************There are many factors that need to be considered when calculating the cost of downtime. A formula to calculate the costs of the outage should capture both the cost of lost productivity of employees and the cost of lost income from missed sales. - The Estimated average cost of 1 hour of downtime = (Employee costs per hour) *( Number of employees affected by outage) + (Average Income per hour). - Employee costs per hour is simply the total salaries and benefits of all employees per week, divided by the average number of working hours per week. - Average income per hour is just the total income of an institution per week, divided by average number of hoursLost Productivity- Number of employees impacted (x hours out * hourly rate) hours per week that an institution is open for business. Lost Revenue-Direct loss, Compensatory payments, Lost future revenue, Billing losses, Investment lossesFinancial Performance-Revenue recognition, Cash flow, Lost discounts (A/P), Payment guarantees, Credit rating, Stock priceDamaged ReputationCustomers, Suppliers, Financial markets, Banks, Business partnersOther ExpensesTemporary employees, equipment rental, overtime costs, extra shipping costs, travel expenses...
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)Point in time that is tolerable in which data stored on systems must be recovered after an outage or disasterAmount of data loss that a business can endure and still be operationalRecovery Time Objective (RTO)Time before systems and applications must be restored to their operational state after an outage or disasterAmount of downtime that a business can endure and still be operationalAccording to Storage Magazine, typical RPO timeframes are:8% month worth of data7% week worth of data16% days worth of data8% ½ days worth of data15% less than 4 hours of data42% is near zero of acceptable data loss4% of otherSummary: at least 80% require a restore within the first 24 hours of a disaster.Therefore, again make sure that you are TESTING the Backup, as a full Recovery Test, otherwise it’s just a backup but not a complete backup - Make sure you are saving the right stuff!
Share polling results: Poll2When will each backup run?DailyWill this backup be run on the weekends?WeeklyWill this backup be run at month-end?MonthlyWill this backup be run at quarter-end/year-end? How long do you need to keep these volumes?Daily1–2 weeksWeekly5–13 weeksMonthly6–13+ months Examples:Daily(14/1) +1 = 1514 days until expiration, 1 day between rotationsWeekly(35/7) +1 = 635 days until expiration, 7 days between rotationsMonthly(180/30) + 1 = 7180 days until expiration, 30 days between rotationsWhat will each backup do?Save a list of objectsSave a list of librariesSave Domino databasesSave IFS directoriesSave configuration objects or security dataSAVLIB *ALLUSRFull system savePC backups
To quote John Toigo, “Tiered Storage is defined as traditional movement of data between different media types based on the data’s re-reference rate and the typical cost of the media.” The Metrics that decide the level of storage tiering [are] performance, availability, shareability, cost to purchase, and cost to maintain and service the media.
Recovery Time Objectives within an Instant to Weeks; Recovery Point Objectives from zero to a day; Retention periods from Days to DecadesMany organizations are looking to reduce data loss and thus bring the RPO to near-zero, however some companies are not concerned about losing many hours or even a day’s worth of data in the event of a failure. For these companies, manually re-entering transaction from hardcopy records may be acceptable. Finding the solution that meets your needs is what is important. File Recovery (CDP, Disk-to-Disk ): Retention for Hours/Days; Recovery within Instant/MinutesNearline Recovery (Virtual Tape): Retention for Weeks/Months; Recovery within Hours/Days Archive Recovery (Physical Tape): Retention for Years/Decades; Recovery within Days/Weeks
Building a backup infrastructure that is resilient and protected against machine failures, intrusions, natural disasters, human mistakes, software errors, and theft creates the desire to diligently look at all the available options. There are typically two types of options to solve these problems as a storage target. You could get faster tape drives or even implement a automated media or tape library, but tape will not necessarily solve all of your problems. With the lower cost of disk, such as using SATA drives, many organizations are starting to utilize technologies such as disk-disk backup and Virtual Tape Appliances to allow faster backup but more importantly faster recovery of data than tape with mush more control over the granularity and immediate recovery of data.
Parallel SAVES are helpful – but you better have a way to understand how to put it back together! Robot/SAVE customers have no problem there though right? Concurrent SAVE Parallel-Parallel, or there us the Parallel-Serial SAVE. However, the same # of drives for the restore must be used as was used by the SAVE to avoid seize problems.SAVE while Active – same thing, need to make sure journaling is used properly and that the change logs are also protected.SAVCHGOBJ – excellent strategy, but you’d better have a good last full SAVE otherwise your having to rebuild from several backups.All of these things are good ways to reduce the backup Windows, but they do place additional complexities on the backup and more importantly the Restore! That’s why the use of tape is still advocated in each of these suggested solutions. Awe – and finally, a familiar thing that I often hear is, “I am using HA so I do not need backup and HA is my DR solution”. Well it’s a great way to reduce the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), but HA is not DR and DR is not HA. The reason is simply because of the synchronous nature of the replication/mirroring software. Case in point, what if the system gets corrupted – well the synchronous replication just mirrored the situation onto both systems. Or even more common, what if Silly Sally messes up the system and accidently deletes a file – synchronous replication occurred – and if there was not a backup at some point in time then well – sorry Sally – I am afraid it’s gone! In the case of the HA example, let’s say the physical tape is used as advocated but it is now at the Remote Site. Well the fact that it is there is good in that the required backup window does not impact production and the primary system can stay online longer, but wait, in the event of a disaster, the remote site is a lights out environment, and so now the tape is 500 miles away – that’s a 1000 mile round trip and at least a day or two before the recovery can begin in order to get Silly Sally happy again! In each of these great examples and ways to reduce the backup window, you can also improve the recovery time if you consider using virtual tape! That is with one exception, the use of virtual tape functionality within the i5/OS can certainly help with reducing backup windows given there is enough disk spindles available – performance of disk depends on the number of disk spindles. It will not however help with full system restores since you cannot boot from your own disk if the system is down. (e.g. Testing back in the v5r4 timeframe indicated that v.tape within the i5/OS could be faster than 3x LTO3 drives, but only if hundreds of disk spindles were available – not likely or cost effective). With virtual tape appliances, they can be remotely managed, even if located at lights out environments. And back to our HA example with Silly Sally, the virtual cartridge backups themselves can be efficiently replicated back to a virtual tape appliance at the Primary site even as an Full System SAVE image. And depending on the particular product and connectivity used may even be able to present a virtual drive as a designated Alternate IPL device to reduce the downtime and associated expense to get the system back up and operational. More on all that later. First, let’s say your convinced that the Virtual Tape Appliance seems interesting. Just “What is a VTL and Why Use it?”
The first Virtual Tape solution was intended to service the mainframe market back in 1997. Since then virtual tape appliances provide an easy, plug-in play type of product that requires no operational or process changes in order to work in the your existing environment. The goal of any virtual solution is to not disrupt your existing backup processes and policies. With Virtual Tape, the Backup application on the host system thinks it’s talking to a tape library or tape drive but it is actually backing up to a VTL as adisk buffer. “You could say that you get disk performance but with the “tape” look and feel.” Virtual Tape Appliance can be shared by presenting multiple “virtual” tape resources for various host system types and OS versions. Provides significant management and consolidation benefits to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Also, some include integrated support for physical tape therefore although data resides on disk and is available for a restore, it can be written to tape as needed without impact to servers or backup window. Data growth can be managed through scaling the capacity and performance of VTL where unlike tape, there is no need to add additional media servers or additional physical tape devices.
We touched on some of the reasons why to consider virtual tape already, but others values are described in this chart based on research from Enterprise Strorage Group as follows:Reference the first 4chart items as:- Improve recovery performance- Ease of Deployment- Improve Backup performance- Reduce/eliminate tape media management issuesSome other benefits of VTL include:Remote VaultingAdditional security for older technology tape drivesVirtual Tape Life Cycle ManagementExtend available capacity to physical tapeBalance price/performance, power, cooling, costsMedia Server Off loadProvide better performance & efficiency for the back-up processReduce License proliferationHigher utilization of Tape resourcesTape Consolidation VTL manages physical tape for caching or import/exportIncreased Media LifeReduce mount/eject frequencyLess seek and retrieve
We’ve talked about business continuity, disaster planning, top pain points experienced, and ways to address the pain. Disk and Tape both serve their valued purpose, and a virtual tape solution can seamless integrate into my existing environment to improve efficiency and reduce cost of backup operations. So what features should I be looking for in a VTL solution? With over 5700 different VTL solutions on the market today from every sort of vendor, solution integrator, and reseller it is important to figure out what feature sets you are most interested in. Of the estimated 5700 solutions, most of them are focused on the Open Systems market (not the IBM market). About a dozen or so vendors and solutions even claim that they can support IBM i environments, some require special software to run on the host to use their device (not good), only a few support integrated tape capabilities, and even fewer can be designated as an alternate IPL device. So if your looking all of these typical features listed here, then your short list is down to a handful of solutions - each with their vendor and product strengths and various price points.
You can consolidate the number of physical tape devices you have to manage for backups, while drastically reducing the amount of downtime you experience in your environment since virtual tape data is available for immediate restore. D-mode Alternate IPL device Support in an IBM i environment.Most SATA/SAS disk based solutions will provide write performance than LTO4 and slightly less than LTO5 single stream rates. The cost of media, support for up to multiple virtual tape drives available in a single appliance.Device ConsolidationLeverages disk for efficient writes/readsSupports multiple server connectionsOffers multiple virtual drives per connectionEmulates IBM tape drive and library formatsMore Cost EffectiveDoesn’t require expensive DASDNo additional software required on hostScales as business changes
The goal of any virtual solution is to not disrupt your existing backup processes and policies. For IBM i, solutions should emulate standard IBM tape drives and library formats and seamlessly integrate into the existing backup environments.Robot/SAVE – data availability, cost effectiveness; seamless integration, looks like a tape, same volume IDs, same classes, with minimum varied backup sets required; no tape to handle, no external tape to mange offsite, yet the backup is secure off of the IBM i, and you can use data replication to get the data offsite at some certain time.Robot/REPORTS – Spool files and critical reports can be archived in a cost effective way using virtual tape; no mounting of a tape needed, multiple tape drives available, no resource contention issues, restore back based on retention periods. Can quickly view online any of the reports that you are currently print for auditors or finance teams, store them securely, yet have them easily accessible for distribution to any location.There should be integrated and optimized ways of writing data of to physical tape if you have offsite storage policies in place. Stacked Tape Export: multiple virtual cartridges written to each physical tape.Benefit: Reduced media costs since you are better able to utilize the available capacity on the physical tape cartridge.Native Tape Export: strip off the metadata and pass the data payload as if the backup application had written it. Benefit: You can restore a cartridge written in the Native Tape Export format directly to the IBM server without a host being involved.
With all of the downsizing having occurred in 2010/2011, Storage Administrators and CIOs are now focusing on “Doing More With Less” approach to improve Operational Efficiency and looking for ways to automate processes, services, to free up resources so that they can focus on more strategic initiatives like refresh and application refresh now that the economy and the corporate budget is looking a little better.Support for things like user-defined policies to trigger events, or the ability to schedule task so that are performed transparently without human intervention. Virtual media pools provide ways to more efficiently manage media. Could create a media pool structure to match my backup classes and sets, with a daily pool, weekly pool, monthly pool, and even a year-end pool if desired, with each pool having a different retention period. The ability to designate a virtual tape drive as a being an alternate IPL device can also improve uptime (reducing downtime) to get systems and partitions returned quickly…. Granted you are “Saving the right Stuff”!
VTL solutions scale very well to meet the needs of your growing business. First, you can share the virtual tape device extending the efficiency across your data center to service all the major servers with a single virtual tape appliance. Second, if you need more storage then you can simply connect it, some VTL solutions allow support for any disk array from mainstream providers, where you simply license additional managed capacity to use that storage. Further, built-in techniques help increase the amount of effective storage available as well by way of dynamic virtual tape sizing where storage is not allocated until data is written to disk.
Data reduction techniques by way of advanced compression, delta differencing, single instance repository, and data deduplication all seek to further expand upon the economies of disk. In each technique, your reduction ratios are a ‘mileage may vary’ situation depending on the repeatable patterns in the data set, number of instances stored, etc.
Source SideApplications like email and content management are building in Single Instance Store and DeduplicationSome backup applications can perform client or remote office server deduplicationWAN devices perform deduplicationTarget SideWAN devices perform deduplicationSome deduplication vendors are promoting their appliances for live data as well as a backup targetSome NAS devices perform Single Instance Store or fixed block deduplication on live data or can serve as a target for backup applicationsVTLs serve as a target for backup applications and have added in-line and post process deduplicationBackup applications like TSM are including server deduplicationData deduplication for example is probably the best thing to happen to disk storage in the last decade, but in the IBM market customers tend to be a little cautious. First off, with deduplication there is no reasonable way to get tape offsite in a hurry. In fact, deduplication and physical tape are mutually exclusive – they don’t play well together since it would take a lot of effort to get all of the pointers and reference data on to a since tape. For this reason, in most cases the data has to be rehydrated before it can be written to tape, or as most deduplication vendors claim, if you need to have a physical tape then you can write the data to tape and then write the data to the deduplication appliance – which is essence just doubled your backup window to protect the same data.Further, De-duplication on unstructured data is great, but it is not well suited for every situation such as IBM i. With good reason too, since the “bread & butter” of activities are based on DB2 databases, there is really not much value since transactional databases tend to have a lot of change, where for example when a library is backed up it tends to have every object in the database flagged so that when a huffman encoding technique or other hashing type of algorithm is used, it appears to be new data. For example let’s consider that in a SAVE 21, you may SAVE 99,000 objects, where user profiles, and date/time stamp is flagged on every single object – unless the data is stagnate and never touched, you’ll not get a good reduction ratio. Still, because of the latency to restore de-duplicated data - for aged or infrequently accessed data, you’re better off using a Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM) type of product to move the stale data off to more appropriate tiered storage leaving only a small stub file behind in the event that the file needs to be accessed.
Unlike TCP throughput, fasp throughput is perfectly independent of network delay and robust to extreme packet loss. The bar graph below shows a comparison of throughput obtained by fasp versus the maximum throughput achievable for TCP-based file transfers on an OC-3 (155 Mbps) link under various latency and packet loss conditions. fasp transfer times are as fast as possible and highly predictable, regardless of network conditions. The maximum transfer speed is limited only by the resources (typically disk throughput) of the endpoint system.
Open poll: What technologies are you using?
SPHiNX™ reduces risk while meeting the specific needs from the desktop to the data center, providing a holistic data protection solution saving money, time and resources and satisfying disaster recovery requirements.
Whether with the SPHiNX, or another virtual solution – the goal would be to provide you with a holistic data protection solution that can meet you specific needs and grow with you in your environment as your data continues to grow.
Q1: How do I get a trial of Robot/SPACE?A1: Contact your Sales rep and they will give you the access code to be able to down load the product so you can install it.Q2: Can I compare 3 collections at the same time?A2: No you can just compare 2 collections at a time.Q3: Is there a way to see the size history for a single IFS directory?A3: Go to the collection history, select IFS directories and then right click on the directory in question and you can select Size History.Q4: How often should I run a collection?A4: I would suggest running the DETAIL collection weekly and the SUMMARY daily.Q5: Is there a process to purge collection history?A5: Yes, In Setup there is an option for History Purge.Q6: can I monitor one file for growth? Can I be notified if it exceeds 25% growth rate?A6: Yes. Set up your collection group with the proper object filter. Create and assign a collection event threshold to that object.Q7: How often does temporary job space get checked?A7: The ASP monitors are defaulted to 5 minutes but are user modifiable. Q8: Can you share setup between partitions?A8: Yes, you can export your setup from one partition and import it to others. http://www.helpsystems.com/webinars to browse recorded and upcoming webinars.