Darwin meets data storage: televaulting provisions storage as a utility

Computer Technology Review, Oct, 2004 by Eran Farajun

A core function of the billing system is integrated budgeting, allowing customers to allocate a specified backup budget based on storage capacity or financial limits. This budgeting feature helps to keeps costs in line by notifying the customer's management if and when budgets have been surpassed. Experience has also shown that end users are much more judicious about their personal data storage practices when they understand that their own department is being directly billed for their usage.

The Self-Healing tool is a transparent televaulting utility that enables an IT operation to ensure that it is meeting its QoS commitment to its corporate backup "customers." This tool runs seamlessly in the background, constantly scanning the DS-System for anomalies. It immediately notifies the administrator (and adds a record in the event log) when it encounters a corrupted or otherwise problematic file. The Self-Healing tool then automatically isolates the potentially corrupted file to a pre-determined quarantined location where it can be safely deleted. To complete the self-healing cycle, a notification trigger is sent to the DS-Client to resend a latest generation copy of the file on its next scheduled backup.

The unique Backup Lifecycle Management tool automatically migrates DS System's data from disk storage to tape-based storage. The policy-based tools keep all "critical" data on disk and only migrate data categorized as "important" to tape. The unique feature of the BLM tool is that it allows end users to set the policies controlling the migration of data from disk to tape, based on the understanding that end users are the best people to know the needs for their every day file access. The BLM tool is technology and file system agnostic and integrates with HSM file systems, such as Sun's SAMFS, ADIC's StorNext, Legato's DiskXtender, and other third-party ILM solutions.

Scalability

Televaulting also addresses two of the major restrictions of conventional remote tape backup solutions: performance and capacity scalability. The DS System servers are based on an N 1 grid computing model. When the processing demands of a single DS-System server become too much, additional low-cost servers can be added to create a scalable grid. All backup processes are still managed as if there was only a single virtual DS System, but performance is scaled and load balanced across all of the available processors in the grid.

Another potential backup bottleneck is the file count limitations on a single mount point with any file system. With the DS System collecting backup data from multiple DS Clients around the world, it does not take long before the mount point barrier is reached, putting an artificial cap on the available capacity. The DS System eliminates this restriction with a proprietary automatic Multiple Mount Point capability that enables access to virtually unlimited capacity, with support for 2 billion directories in a single volume.

Conclusion

Televaulting is the first solution that effectively addresses the cost, performance, scalability, and management of data protection issues inherent in distributed backup. The innovative (service-oriented architecture) of Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises is the key to the distributed backup advantages of the televaulting software model. This new approach to distributed backup is the first technology that provisions backup as a utility, giving customers the advantages of a "pay as you go" application rather the cost penalties of the traditional licensing and agents model. By centralizing the administration of backups of dispersed data islands, Asigra Televaulting enables further reductions of the operational costs associated with distributed backup, and improves remote end-users' restore experience.