“Are you backing up C:\myfiles? We just accidentally deleted the folder.”
“I know it’s not in our original saveset, but any chance you have a backup of xyx?”
Sound familiar? If you are a backup administrator, I know you have
heard variations of the requests above. Traditionally, new systems get
deployed and the owners give a specific saveset to the backup
administrators. Then when a restore is requested, it never fails that
the request will be outside of the original saveset.
I have experienced these scenarios numerous times with traditional
full/incremental backup products. The more you backup, the more storage
you consume and that means longer backup windows. When I first started
in my current position, we were backing up 100 servers with specific
savesets. At that time, we had over 500 production servers. As you can
imagine, this was a nightmare scenario waiting to happen. We were only
able to fulfill about 75% of our restore requests. Not because the
savesets where corrupt, but because we weren’t backing up what was
requested for restore.
Fortunately, we were able to invest in a new purpose-built
deduplicated backup appliance. (EMC Avamar, but there are other products
on the market). Avamar is a disk based global deduplication backup
appliance. Deduplication is performed at the source and target. Since
deduplication is performed at the source, backup times and network
bandwidth are significantly reduced using the Avamar solution. Migrating
from BackupExec to Avamar was an easy process, but understanding the
benefits of deduplicated backup took some time. When we first migrated,
we were using the same traditional philosophy: Specific savesets for
specific servers. As time went on, we realized that each time we added a
new saveset the increase in storage utilization on the deduplication
appliance was less than minimal. We decided to start adding more
servers, and increasing the scope of our saveset. Within 6 months, we
were backing up full file system savesets on 1200 servers.
When we started this migration, we were convinced our environment was
different. We were convinced our change rate was too high. We were
convinced that backing up everything, every day was too much data. We
were wrong, and I’m glad we were.
Typical deduplication rates stated by EMC Avamar Team:
- File Systems: Initial = 70%, Ongoing = 99.7%
- Databases: Initial = 30%, Ongoing = 90-95%
Deduplication rates that we experienced (average):
- File Systems: Initial = 75%, Ongoing = 99.9%
- Databases: Initial = 20%, Ongoing = 85%
We are currently backing up 1300 servers nightly with savesets
totaling 350 terabytes, and our daily change rate is approximately 1
terabyte. Since moving to this new policy we have experienced the
following benefits:
- Restore fulfillment is 100%
- No discussion on what to backup. Everything is backed up.
Deduplicated backup is a backup administrators dream. Less storage
consumption, shorter backup windows, higher restore fulfillment rates,
and the ability to sleep at night.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Have you tried the latest EMC Avamar ?