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The main objective of this white paper is to educate and inform users of the HP Data Protector 6.0 software Advanced Backup to Disk feature about what levels of performance are achievable using different backup scenarios.
Our emphasis is on showing what is typical and not upon what the best-case scenarios are. This white paper highlights where the current performance bottlenecks exist and how they can be overcome. The target audience for this white paper are system integrators, solution architects and anyone involved in getting first-rate backup performance from their infrastructure investments.
Introducing HP Data Protector 6.0 software
HP Data Protector software is designed for the most demanding 24x7 environments and offers automated high-performance backup and recovery from disk and tape.
HP Data Protector software simplifies the use of complex backup and recovery procedures with the fastest installation, automated routine tasks, and easy-to-use features. The ideal solution is to reduce IT costs and complexity while remaining reliable and scalable to grow from single server environments to the largest distributed enterprise infrastructures, providing broad compatibility of operating systems, applications, drives, libraries, and disk arrays.
The Advanced Backup to Disk feature improves the backup process with continuous backup of transaction log files, backup of slow clients without multiplexing, easy resource access and sharing, plus backup in tape-less branch offices, while offering fast and easy configuration and licensing. In addition, it allows single file restore directly from disk or tape. The following sections, File library and Object copy, give a short overview about the features required for Advanced Backup to Disk.
File library
Data Protector provides a disk-based device type called “file library.” Disk-based devices are designed to do backups and restores to and from disk. The file library device is the most sophisticated disk-based device. It focuses on low-cost disk arrays, such as the MSA1000, which is positioned mainly as a backup device. In the event that the file library is running out of space, new backup capacity can be assigned automatically.
Configuration of a file library is very easy. You must define mount points where Data Protector can create its “media” and optionally, the number of simultaneous “writes” that can be used. Data Protector can utilize this like any other physical backup device and can auto-create the media files on the fly as required. This capability is called “Advanced Backup to Disk.”
Object copy
Object copy provides the capability to copy a backup object from the source destination to a target destination, where the target could be another media type. With object copy you can create copies of backed-up objects and keep them in several locations. You are able to migrate the backed-up data to another media type, so you may use high-speed disk backup for the initial backup and then replicate (migrate) the data to tape for offsite storage.
Backup performance will usually be limited by one or more bottlenecks in the system, of which the tape drive is just one part. The goal is to make the tape drive the bottleneck. That way the system can achieve the performance figures as advertised on the drive’s specification sheet.
Note that backup jobs can stress hardware resources up to their highest limit, which would seldom happen during normal application load. This puts the emphasis on the rest of the system and causes failures, which are based in the involvement of many components and their time-critical handshake of data.
The flow of data throughout the system must be fast enough to provide the tape drive with data at its desired rates. High-speed tape drives, such as the Ultrium 960, are so fast that this can be a difficult goal to achieve. If the backup performance does not match the data sheet of the tape drive, then there is a bottleneck somewhere else in the system.
One single component, like a 100-Mb/s network, can decrease an SDLT or LTO tape drive performance to a very low transfer rate. This would be a very good use case for first staging the data on disk and then backing it up to tape.
All components must be considered for getting the theoretical backup performance. Practical performance data can only be obtained from benchmarks.
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