Does Your Backup Environment Measure Up?

Computerworld - A recent GlassHouse Technologies assessment of a large, multisite backup environment found an overall backup success rate for the Windows environment of 59%. Shocking? Yes. Uncommon? Not really. While alarmingly low, it is not unusual to uncover backup metrics that are significantly out of line with expectations.

An assessment is, by definition, a view of an environment spanning a limited time frame, and sometimes a poor metric can be attributed to a one-time anomaly -- the Murphy's Law syndrome. Often, however, it is a sign of systemic flaws. Whatever the cause, the real question that should be asked is Why do these results come as a surprise? Why aren't there established metrics and reporting in place to know that backups are in trouble?

This problem of metrics continues to plague storage environments, and it is due to combined shortcomings in process, technology and organization. As with any set of processes, quality improvement requires appropriate metrics to determine where you are and where you are heading. Very few backup environments have established this capability, much to the frustration of both users and senior management.

Standard backup-application reporting falls short in a number of ways:

• Reporting does not translate across various levels of management, applications and business units.
• Current methods of reporting are limited in time window and in granularity.
• Historical reporting and trend analysis is difficult.
• Assembling meaningful reports often requires time-consuming manual -- or semi-automated -- piecing together of data from multiple sources.

Answering questions that should be simple, like the overall backup health of a critical application or identification of servers that have missed multiple backup cycles, turns into projects. What to do? A specialized backup reporting tool is a must for today's environments, and there are a number of products out there to choose from. Keep in mind, however, that the tool is only a vehicle to collect and present information, and as such is just the first step in a comprehensive backup quality improvement program. Establishing policies and standard operating procedures to effectively use this information is the real challenge.

To some extent, we have a forest versus trees problem. We’ve got to get above the tree-level of backup operations and begin to view the entire data-protection forest.

Jim Damoulakis is chief technology officer of GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a leading provider of independent storage services in Framingham, Mass. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.