How big is yours? Do you feel like a failure when you don’t make it?
Whether you’re for disk-based backup [D2T] or like to go straight from clients to tape, or a mixture of both [D2D2T] -- there’s obviously a need for backup and everyone's common problem is that their backup window is shrinking. & Why is it that every time I refer to D2D2T I think of Star Wars & R2D2?
My customers are very cognizant of the fact that backup data has different business values. Determining the business value and how to do so is a topic that interests me. You can use indexing engines that will classify your data for you so that you can assess business value to it. Or, from the start you can use Storage Management tools such as NetApp’s Operations Manager to group and categorize your physical storage as it corresponds to different departments and data stored within your entire business. Either way, you’re going to know what data matters most to you and must be backed up religiously and what data you just backup as a formality because you have to.
How many of you thought 4 years ago that VTL’s [Virtual Tape Library] would be as popular as they are today? Did you foresee emulating tape as a trend that would hold it’s place in the backup business? I did. In fact, I remember when NetApp was partnered with two (2) different VTL vendors back in 2004 and then acquiring the superior one to transform into our very own NetApp on NetApp solutions. Since then, we’ve done a lot with the technology and it’s one of the very best solutions out there for Virtual Tape Libraries with many differentiating features that sets us apart from the rest.
When talking about VTL to customers, I like to not only talk about what it does well and how it should be performing for you, but I also like to talk about what it shouldn’t be doing. Using a VTL should NOT require you to use any additional physical tape media than if you did not have one installed in your backup environment. Every other VTL out there requires you to to set a fixed size on the virtual tape when configuring the virtual library. Meaning, if you are going be eventually writing to an LTO-3 tape with native capacity of 400 GB, then your virtual tape size must be set to 400 GB and it will stay as that for the entire process. Well, what about compression? What happens with the Physical Tape library compresses the date being written to it? Well, then the physical tape will fill up about half-way according to a typical 2:1 compression.
Welcome to the world of having a room full of half-full tapes stacked up to the ceiling. What does NetApp do to avoid this? We sample the data for compressibility as it’s being written to the VTL and then dynamically adjust the size of that virtual tape to match the estimated compressed capacity of the physical tape it will be written to. The LTO-3 virtual tape is now automatically adjusted depending on what type of data is being written to it and how it will compress in the Real-Tape World. Welcome to not wasting money or space on extra physical tapes when using a VTL. This reason alone would be a good enough reason for me to go the NetApp VTL route. I hate waste… especially when it’s wasting money.
Don’t even get me started on how much I love to Dedupe. I’d like to dedupe the contents of my house.
Hi Gilda,
I think someone needs to be educated on what Tape Smart Sizing *really* is, and how it differs from/interacts with VTL (hardware) compression...:
http://thebackupblog.typepad.com/thebackupblog/2008/08/tape-smart-sizing-another-netapp-myth.html
Posted by: Geert | August 23, 2008 at 01:54 AM