A co-worker recently shared an article from Storage Magazine, “Enterprise data protection shopping lists focus on cost, scalability”. The article included a survey and there was one question I found interesting. It made me think of the NetBackup 5330 Appliance and the fact that it is specifically designed for performance, especially when it comes to recovery.
In the survey, when asked what the most important factors were for evaluating and purchasing backup tech, 51% of respondents selected Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), the third most popular response. What was interesting was the #6 response - Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) with 39% respondents.
I liken the survey results of Backup and Recovery to Batman and Robin, both B&R. Recovery is often the overlooked partner of Backup. While Batman (Backup) may get top billing, people are realizing the importance of Robin (Recovery) and only having ½ of the dynamic duo (data protection) is not a solution. However, organizations are discovering that greater focus may be needed on recovery. In a disaster, recovery time is what gets the C level’s attention, and can make or break a career. Often your career.
We are addressing recovery time with the NetBackup 5330 appliance, an integrated purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA). It is designed and engineered for performance, both backup and recovery – and is delivering outstanding recovery results. Based on our internal testing, it restores 4.1TB per hour based on 8 streams at 98% deduplication. Let’s see how that stacks up:
- Internal testing. In performance test comparison to the NetBackup 5230 appliance, the NetBackup 5330 delivered:
- Up to 3x faster backup
- Up to 5.8x faster recovery
- Up to 4.9x faster replication
- Customer testing. The NetBackup 5330 has gone through extensive customer beta testing and customer proof-of-concepts (POCs). One customer, an international healthcare information technology company, put the NetBackup 5330 through some significant job count tests and they were pushing up to 600 concurrent backups to see if they could break it. They were able to consistently achieve backups in the 450 concurrent job range – representing more than 10X what they can do today.
- Competition. In a comparison to a leading data dedupe storage device, the NetBackup 5330 delivers 55% greater restore performance. But don’t take my word for it. You can run your own restore number of your current data dedupe solution, or ask the OEM for their published numbers.
A Recommendation
If recovery is a key factor in meeting your data protection needs and service level agreements, I have two recommendations;
- Do the math. Ask your current vendor for their backup AND recovery performance numbers. You will have to ask for the recovery number as it is not typically published, and then do the math. Based on the recovery number and your amount of data, is it reasonable that a recovery job would be completed within your service level agreement?
- Check out the King of Scale. Symantec commissioned an independent third party to do extensive testing of three different backup solutions and the results are eye-opening. Many data protection solutions were good enough when installed, but as the data has grown, organizations have found it does not keep pace and performance begins to lag and then drag. King of Scale Benchmark Report.
Summary
The NetBackup 5330 is engineered for performance, scale, and resiliency. To learn more about the NetBackup 5330 and its capabilities:
While backup performance often gets top billing, recovery performance is just as critical in order to make B&R the dynamic duo of data protection.