By Deanna Hoover, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
What is your favorite time of year? For me, I am a fan of fall. This weekend I took full advantage of fall in beautiful Colorado. My weekend included a 13.1 mile running race that incorporated rocks, roots, huge hills and a very narrow trail with 1,000 runners. This meant that we could only run as fast as the person in front of us because there was a bottleneck of people. Basically, there was too much congestion on the trail, so my run was slower than expected. The run reminded me of my days as a backup administrator. There always seemed to be a single point in the backup stream that would cause my backup/recoveries to be stuck at a specific speed.
Much like my experience with running this weekend, we have learned that backup administrators are struggling due to the amount of data that needs to be backed up, causing network or path congestion. For example: it is estimated by IDC that by 2020, the data will increase 50-times. However, backup budgets are not growing at the same rate.
So, the big question is: how can we get ahead of the pack and ensure that future, and current, backups are not plagued with slowness due to data growth and path congestion?
EMC NetWorker 8 was designed for optimal performance and scalability. With NetWorker 8, there is deeper integration with Data Domain. DD Boost is integrated in the NetWorker 8 Client allowing deduplication at the file system level, along with the existing application layer. NetWorker 8 also introduced client direct, which provides a direct data path from the client to the storage target. The client/application side of DD Boost functionality means that data is deduplicated at the client/application and about 95% less data is passed over the network, so you will see increased backup performance for file systems and application backups.
To prove the point that NetWorker 8 does indeed increase performance and reduce bandwidth requirements, EMC ran a test with client side deduplication of file systems vs. file system deduplication on the storage node. There was a two-thirds reduction in the backup time when we leveraged the new client direct functionality with DD Boost.
I’d like to encourage you to find out more on how NetWorker can help you meet your backup challenges.
Where to go for more information:
Listen to the replay of the EMC Live session ‘Solving Enterprise Backup Challenges—What’s New In NetWorker’, and of course, we encourage you to visit and participate with the NetWorker Online Community.
