During a recent analyst day presentation, Dave Hitz explained that the NetApp vision for managing complex IT environments is built around the idea of empowering users to think in terms of data and data management rather than the underlying physical storage.

An example of the practical, real-world implementation of this vision involves NetApp Protection Manager. Protection Manager not only simplifies the configuration, management, and monitoring of Snapshot™ copies, disk-based backup, and replication across an entire NetApp storage infrastructure, it can also incorporate Windows®, UNIX®, and Linux® server backup using Open Systems SnapVault® as part of a broad data protection strategy that can encompass remote offices and virtually any existing storage array.

This month Tech OnTap is pleased to feature a nine-minute Protection Manager Technical Demo previously shared only in customer presentations. This demo illustrates key components of Protection Manager and provides a step-by-step guide to solving three common administrative challenges:

1. How do you make sure everything is protected when data is distributed everywhere?
   
   
2. How do you scale your data protection environment without spending all day on tedious, manual tasks?
   
   
3. How do you rapidly roll out global changes across all sites and systems?

A quick summary of how Protection Manager addresses these administrative challenges is highlighted below; to see exactly how these tasks are accomplished watch the technical demo.

Challenge 1: Make Sure All Data Is Protected

Historically, managing backup and disaster recovery across multiple sites, systems, and applications has been a time-consuming and often manual process. Storage admins can easily get bogged down in the details of managing huge numbers of storage systems, disks, and tapes, rather than staying focused on the important data they contain.

One of the biggest challenges involves simply ensuring that all data is protected. Changes happen rapidly and aren't always communicated clearly from the application team to the storage team or the backup team. How can you be sure that critical data is actually scheduled to be backed up? Unfortunately, all too often it is when you go to restore and the data isn’t there.

In a recent well-publicized example, the State of Alaska had to spend about $200,000 dollars to re-scan over 800,000 document images that had not been backed up. The documents were lost while a technician was trying to fix a problem with the traditional SAN array. The technician subsequently discovered that a critical database file had "inadvertently" been left out of the backup. Without it, the database containing the images could not be recovered. Ouch. (Read a full account of the incident in Enterprise IT Planet)

The traditional approach to this problem involves running frequent reports and spending a lot of time and effort to make sure that all data is protected. When NetApp designed Protection Manager, this was recognized as a critical pain point. Protection Manager includes a simple "dashboard" that is the starting point for most management tasks. The "Data Protection Status" and "Unprotected Data" panes allow admins to quickly identify and address unprotected data.

The "Data Protection Status" section includes detailed failure information. These warnings and errors enable quick identification when SLAs are jeopardized.

Additionally, as new storage or hosts are added to the environment, Protection Manager automatically detects them and summarizes this info in the "Unprotected Data" section. This enables an admin to easily see all unprotected data in one place and drill down to take the necessary actions to back up and/or mirror the data.

Challenge 2: Eliminate Repetitive, Manual Setup Processes

With storage capacity increasing rapidly, new applications and new data are introduced on a regular basis. Unfortunately, adding them into an existing backup environment is not a simple task. Admins must first figure out if there is enough capacity on the existing destination and if there is enough network bandwidth to accommodate the backup window. Then schedules, retention policies, destinations, and other variables for each individual server or volume must be established. The process is tedious and can be error prone.

Protection Manager significantly streamlines this process by allowing admins to get the job done in just four easy steps:

1. Create a new "dataset" to contain the data objects to be protected. A dataset is a collection of data objects with similar protection requirements. If the new data has the same protection requirements as an existing dataset, simply add it to the existing dataset. That's it. All subsequent tasks are automated by the software.
2. Select a policy to apply to the dataset. Protection Manager includes a set of pre-defined policy templates. Admins can use an existing policy or create a new policy to accommodate different schedules.
3. Select a resource pool. Protection Manager ensures maximum utilization of secondary storage resources by grouping them into "resource pools." Once a resource pool reaches a defined threshold, an alert is triggered to provision more storage for that pool.
4. Commit changes.

Protection Manager automatically correlates the datasets and underlying physical storage resources, so admins don't need to worry about all the particulars of the storage infrastructure. The conformance checker built into Protection Manager validates the configuration to ensure that everything is set up properly. Protection Manager then provisions the secondary storage and initializes the backup. Heavy lifting is done automatically by the software, and Protection Manager sends automated alerts if any of the policies are violated or any manual changes are made on the storage system. Alerts are also triggered if any of the data protection operations run into trouble.

Challenge 3: Make Global Changes

As government regulations, business policies, and corporate requirements change, an organization's data protection policies are adjusted to meet new SLAs. Suppose you have a corporate mandate to change your global backup schedule, perhaps from a minimum of once every 24 hours to once every 12 hours. How long will that take to carry out and how much manpower will it require to implement the new policy in all data centers and all remote offices? Increasing the number of backups may have significant implications for secondary storage, so in this scenario admins would often need to spend significant time checking out secondary disk and tape resources to make sure they won't be exceeded in addition to everything else.

Once again, Protection Manager makes a potentially complicated and error-prone task simple and straightforward. Two simple but powerful features–datasets and global policies–make it possible to quickly implement changes across an entire organization. From the Protection Manager console, admins simply change the policy or policies that apply to key datasets. Backup schedules and retention policies can be changed with just a few clicks.

Because Protection Manager has direct access to primary and secondary storage, there are no surprises. The conformance checker verifies sufficient capacity in the resource pools to accommodate the backup of all the volumes selected in the dataset and generates alerts to provision more capacity as necessary. And, because NetApp Snapshot and SnapVault transfer changed blocks rather than whole files and utilize space very efficiently, this type of change typically has less resource impact than it might with other disk-based or tape-based backup methods.

Watch the Technical Demo

For an in-depth look at the Protection Manager interface and detailed, step-by-step examples showing how key tasks are accomplished using this tool, watch the nine-minute Protection Manager Demo.

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