microsoft exchange

Are You “Syncsorting” Your Data?

February 9, 2012

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

We recently held our annual sales kickoff and it was quite an event. Three days of meetings, trainings sessions, hundreds of conversations, and lots of fun mixed in.

A favorite moment for me was having one of our customers speak to the assembled group about their experience with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB).

This particular customer (who I don’t have permission to identify publicly) is an organization of more than 20,000 employees spread across 1,500+ locations. The company’s IT environment is pushing 200 servers (physical and virtual), 50 terabytes of data and a Microsoft Exchange system of more than 10,000 mailboxes. Their backup environment was giving them a serious headache – long backup windows, slow restores, lots of tape to handle. Backup was also a full time job. They literally had a contractor on staff five days a week just to handle it! They were using a conventional backup product (you’d know the name if I said it).

Enter NSB.  Let’s get right to what changed.

  • Backup windows went from 18 hours to 30-45 minutes! Yes, you read that correctly. A 96% decrease in time!
  • Restore times changed from 2-4 hours to restore a system to being back on line in 5 to 10 minutes.
  • Messy tape shipments are gone, replaced by data replication (using SnapMirror). While the customer thankfully has not had to do a major restore, testing shows they could get all their tier 1 applications up and running in 1 to 2 hours should they lose their main data center.
  • They no longer have a full-time contractor to run backups. Instead, data protection takes about 30 minutes of attention every few days, a huge boon to a busy IT organization.

I’d call that a major success at modernizing a conventional backup architecture!

My favorite part of the story though is how this customer came up with a new word for recovery. When the IT team restores information using NSB, they say we’re “Syncsorting” the data!

You can be “Syncsorting” your data too, assuming you like the idea of a 96% reduction in backup time and recovery in ten minutes or less.  If you want to find out just how NSB can help you, please drop us a line.

{ 0 comments }

Talking with Netgain at VMworld 2011

September 13, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

VMworld was a whirl this year. The Syncsort booth was crowded all day long, and we had hundreds of conversations with attendees discussing their data protection wants and needs.  Way too much happened for me to fit it all into one blog post, so instead I’ll be putting out a number of posts over the next few weeks. Kind of a virtual re-run of the event.

One of my favorite things from VMworld this year was the excellent participation Syncsort had from its customers. It is one thing to hear me get up and talk about the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup solution (which I did I think four thousand times), but it’s quite another to hear from someone that uses the solution every day to solve real-world problems.

One of those people is Scott Baynes, CTO of Netgain. Netgain is a service provider with a particular focus on healthcare companies. They help organizations deploy and maintain IT solutions, and they have over 100 customers who have outsourced their IT services to Netgain running in their data centers. This leads to a lot of backup needs: in fact, over 150 terabytes worth at last count.  

Scott stepped onto the stage in our booth to talk to customers about how Netgain uses NSB to protect critical customer data across a range of physical and virtual systems, including critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. With NSB, Netgain has shrunk their backup times by over 90% and greatly improved reliability, while simultaneously ensuring themselves of rapid, reliable recoveries.

But let’s have Scott talk about it in his own words, as he is interviewed by SE Manager Pavan Jhamnani.

 

{ 0 comments }

Snapshots: It’s the Little Things That Mean a Lot

July 19, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

About a month ago, I put up a blog post on “Are Snapshots Backups? Yes indeed!” that turned out to be one of the most widely read and tweeted posts in my blogging tenure here at Syncsort.

Clearly the topic is on peoples’ minds, and we can see it displayed prominently in, for example, ESG’s recent Brief on “NetApp Modernizes Backup” (registration currently required, but we are working on making this more widely available soon).

Rather than re-iterate the points I made originally, I wanted to focus on one particular value that snapshots can deliver (I will blog on a number of such values in the upcoming weeks).   Snapshots are the most efficient way of getting a small amount of data out of a big amount of data. This is specifically the case for recovering objects.

In the context of NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, I am talking about Microsoft Exchange objects (emails, contacts, calendar items, etc.) or SharePoint objects (normally documents, but you could consider a site as well). In a traditional backup model, there are ways to get objects back. Most vendors provide some level of tools and techniques that get you to your goal… eventually.  The problem is the “eventually”!

If you’re backing things up at a file level you are storing them in a format that is not immediately accessible. To get at the little things (objects) contained in the big thing (database file) you have to stream the entire database back to a disk somewhere. Then you poke around in it and find what you want.  Waiting for that restore process can take hours (we’ll assume the source for the restore happens to be on hand – if not you could be looking at days).  Then you have to hope that what you’re looking for happens to be in the database you just restored. Given the often vague information provided by users, it may not be, meaning you get to start all over again, giving you ample time to conquer many more levels of Angry Birds while the restore progress bar makes its slow crawl across the screen. 

Wouldn’t you prefer to get your lost objects restored in about five minutes? Enter snapshots.

The big magic you get from snapshots is that data is available immediately in a useable format. No waiting for data to be copied back to a disk somewhere. You just mount your snapshot to a server, access it via the proper application-specific tools, and recover your objects in minutes. If you picked the wrong backup…no problem. Just take another few minutes to do it again with a different backup (and if you’re like me, a few minutes is plenty of time to fail on another Angry Birds level).

Another nice benefit is that you offload the process from your primary application environment. A lot of Exchange tools, for example, require you to restore the database to an Exchange recovery group.  If you don’t happen to have a spare Exchange server around, that means you’re asking your production Exchange system to mount a new database in order for you to find the object. That’s going to add impact and load to the system.  With snapshots, everything happens outside the Exchange environment except for the final copying of the objects back to the production mailbox.

Without snapshots in place, getting little things back can often mean big things: big time, big impact, big waiting.  Snapshots get you where you need to be fast and reliably. Really, if you’ve never had the pleasure of a snapshot-based restore, you may not even be able to grasp just how simple it is.  To see an Exchange item recovery in action, follow this link and view Demo Video #5.

{ 0 comments }