OCS Distribution (Symantec System Recovery Backup Exec 2012)

Ensuring safety and data availability without which applications, critical for business, cannot work became one of the main problems facing IT department of the modern company, and backup is one of the main tools of the solution of this problem. For the last decade in connection with rapid growth of amount of data, saved up by the companies, requirements to backup significantly became tougher that resulted in popularity of the so-called disk libraries considerably improving the speed of backup and recovery in comparison with traditional tape libraries. Besides, requirements and to functionality of backup systems which should automate the majority of procedures and exempt the system administrator from need manually to copy and recover large volumes of data^[1] increased].

All this was fully felt also in IT department of OCS Distribution company, being one of the leading distributors in the Russian IT market. It is the typical geographically distributed company having at the moment 31 regional offices. A core of corporate IT infrastructure of the company is own DPC constructed about five years ago in St. Petersburg.

Data backup is actively applied to protection of information, crucial for business, against machine and program failures and errors of users at the central office and OCS branches. Backup copies of basic data are stored on arrays of the hard drives EMC Clariion CX3 providing if necessary fast recovery of the necessary information, and for long-term storage of archives of backup copies of the most important data tape libraries are used. Now on all platforms of the company the IT department needs to provide data backup with a total amount about 90 of Tb.

Until recently for management of backup and data recovery in OCS used the standard utilities which are a part of Microsoft Windows Server. As Dmitry Yemelin, the director of IT department of OCS Distribution told, the main lack of these utilities — lack of the single console using which the system administrator could configure and control these processes. As a result at the IT personnel which are responsible for them too much time for accomplishment of routine transactions daily left and if something happened, then it would be impossible to recover the necessary data very quickly. Besides, at accomplishment of such routine procedures manually there was a risk of errors because of a human factor which consequence the irretrievable loss of information, important for business, could turn out to be.

Other problem, quite typical for many companies, was shown that in connection with rapid growth of volume of backup copies the IT department of OCS periodically had to select under backup additional capacity on disk arrays and to buy in addition for them new disks. It would be possible to remove sharpness of this problem using the deduplication of data (prevention of repeated record on disks of backup copies of identical data units) allowing to use more effectively the capacity of disk arrays and by that to reduce the cost of storage of backup copies and also to reduce backup "window", however in Windows Sever for reservation this function is not supported. It became at some point obvious that for more effective and reliable functioning of infrastructure of backup the IT department of OCS needs to select and implement the specialized complete solution, the providing automation of backup operations and recovery using the central console and deduplication of the backup copies written on hard drives.

In search of the solution

Experience of OCS in problem solving with data backup is remarkable the fact that the company, is a lot of years engaged in project distribution, itself backup software from different suppliers has broad examination in the field of practical use of the different systems of a corporate class for data storage, including. The IT department approached the choice of the solution for itself scrupulously. "We studied the majority available in our market of offers from leading manufacturers today, some solutions tested and as a result stopped the choice on release of a packet of Backup Exec 2014 of Symantec company (SBE R14.1) — Dmitry Yemelin told. — Of course, the important role was played by long-term acquaintance to products of this vendor, but first of all in this case was considered that we use the system of email archiving and the Symantec Enterprise Vault files and also antivirus software of Symantec Endpoint Protection long ago and successfully. Therefore we considered the choice of an adjacent product from the same producer the most optimal".

For benefit of SBE R2 played also focus of this product on service of servers and Windows applications (Solution Windows forms a basis of infrastructure of OCS) whereas the majority of other known packets of backup of a corporate class including Symantec NetBackup, are focused on backup in the mixed server environment of Unix/Windows, and were originally developed for Unix systems. Besides, IT specialists OCS attracted in SBE R2 powerful functionality of deduplication with sales opportunity both on reservation server side, and on client side (the reserved server), and use of multithreading at the record of backup copies providing more effective use of resources of disk arrays. It should be noted also what unlike some other solutions for deduplication of data of SBE R2 is purely software product therefore its implementation does not require the additional hardware. At last, as IT specialists of OCS, at this product of Symantec the procedure of deployment, rather simple in comparison with solutions of competitors, consider that it is especially important for the companies with a big branch network.

To implementation

That it so, in OCS were convinced of the course of implementation of SBE R2 which was carried out by own forces of IT department of the company, for what previously two of his employees completed a training course on this product and received the appropriate certificate.

As contractors of the project told, installation and setup of program SBE R2 components did not cause difficulties, and system administrators quickly enough mastered the user-friendly and intuitive graphical user interface of the central console. At the same time because of the large volume of backup copies which part was required to be converted into the SBE format product introduction in corporate DPC of OCS and also at the central offices and in warehouses of the company continued about one and a half months and ended at the end of March, 2014.

The first results, the first estimates

"The most critical for us tasks are increase in speed of backup/data recovery, reduction of the amount of the disk space occupied by backup copies and, certainly, ensuring fault tolerance of a backup system in general — Dmitry Yemelin told. — Using Backup Exec, using at record of backup copies of function of multithreading and deduplication, we expect the successful solution of these tasks".

Already at the moment, according to him, due to use of deduplication the total amount of backup copies managed to be reduced by 30%. This tool at backup of the Microsoft Exchange mailboxes where the same letters, especially at the users working in one division often repeat is especially effective. As a result of the company it was succeeded to postpone acquisition of additional disks for arrays on which backup copies are stored.

OCS are sure that the solution of Symantec will help to ensure integrity and safety of one and all components of a corporate information system, whether it be file resources, corporate e-mail, server applications, databases or virtual environments. Using the central SBE R2 console with the intuitive interface system administrators can quickly manage task performance of reservation and data recovery, entering in need of change to these tasks. And they can create tasks for backup at the level of both all server, and its separate files, to manage "granularity" of backup and recovery, beginning from the e-mail message and to all operating system of the server. Considerably support in use SBE R2 the politician and the program master helping to set correctly parameters of backup and recovery facilitates backup setup. Besides, using the reports generated by SBE, the system administrator can easily be convinced that the task of backup came to the end without errors and on the disk array backup copies of all important data are saved.

All this allowed to release working time of system administrators, and now they will be able more time and attention to give to the priority tasks connected with further development and improvement of IT infrastructure of the distributor and implementation of new services and applications for its business divisions.

Now the IT department of OCS is going to deploy this solution of Symantec on all other platforms of the company, having made it the corporate standard of the software for backup and data recovery.

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