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Ziff Davis Media, parent company of eWEEK, will present a virtual trade show titled “Disk-to-Disk Backup and Recovery,” to be held Dec. 6 at Internet-enabled computers.
Doors “open” online at 9 a.m. EST, and opening remarks begin at 10 a.m. EST.
The free-of-charge, half-day, live, interactive event, sponsored by Symantec and Network Appliance, will focus on the shift of system and network backup technology from tape to disk and how organizations of all sizes can—and do—benefit today from this maturing technology.
The Virtual Tradeshow will feature keynote presentations from Stephanie Balaouras, senior storage analyst at Forrester Research; Patrick Rogers, vice president of Product and Alliances Marketing at Network Appliance; and Rick Huebsch, vice president NetBackup product line at Symantec.
Highlights from first disk-to-disk trends, satisfaction survey to be shared
The event will discuss findings from the storage industrys first survey of worldwide adoption trends and satisfaction with current data-protection technologies. The Forrester Consulting study “The Shift to Disk-Based Data Protection Solutions” (August 2006), commissioned by NetApp, is based on interviews with 400 IT decision-makers from around the world.
“Forresters enterprise clients regularly report that completing necessary backups and achieving desired recovery objectives are becoming more difficult due to growing storage capacities and shrinking backup windows,” Balaouras writes in the report.
“To address these issues, enterprises are increasingly using disk as the primary backup target because disk promises faster backups and restores than tape. In addition, advanced disk-based data protection solutions can achieve higher service levels through multiple or continuous recovery point capabilities.”
The study reports on emerging best practices of combining disk-based backup and tape-based solutions for enterprise data protection. The 23-page report will be available later to all Ziff Davis Virtual Tradeshow attendees.
Global enterprises want and need to understand how—and why—their peers worldwide are moving to disk-to-disk data protection, a Ziff Davis spokesperson said. Here are some of the questions and answers that the Forrester study and the virtual trade show participants will interactively address in detail:
- The prevalence of disk-based data protection. Disk-based data-protection technologies have officially graduated from an emerging market phase to an expanding phase for both data center and remote office data protection.
- The “why” behind which disk-based data-protection technologies are most widely adopted. Disk-based data-protection technologies, such as conventional disk, virtual tape, snapshot replication, and CDP (continuous data protection), have been deployed at varying levels and for different reasons.
- The key drivers behind the increasing adoption of disk-based data protection. Disk-based data-protection solutions are helping users achieve their desired backup and recovery service levels.
In addition to the keynote addresses, there will be breakout seminars and an expert panel exploring the various ways disk-based data-protection technologies can be applied in both the data center and remote office.
“This event will provide customers with important information explaining why companies are deploying disk-based data-protection solutions in their existing tape environments,” Rogers said.
“This Disk-to-Disk Virtual Tradeshow is the first of its kind, providing attendees a unique way to educate themselves on this topic while interacting with experts in the field in real time,” said Martha Schwartz, senior vice president, Ziff Davis Custom Solutions Group.
Participants will hear from industry analysts, real-world users, expert moderators, and executives from the vendor community about real-world benefits of disk-based backup and recovery solutions.
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Real-world users offer experienced-based perspective
One of those real-world users is Steve Weston, chief IT administrator for Provincial Health Services in Vancouver, Canada.
“We provide a lot of specialized services, ranging from womens health issues to cardiology to transplants, over a fairly large regional area,” Weston told eWEEK. “We take in a lot of data—mostly patient information—each day. We require everything to be backed up on a regular basis and stored where we can get to it fairly quickly if needed.”
Weston said that as the amount of new data coming into the system increased, the health services old Windows- and Unix-based data storage system was beginning to overshoot its weekend limits for backing up the weeks data load.
“We were unable to get the job done completely within the time frame we needed,” Weston said. “It was becoming a struggle to get it all done in time, because our 12 tape drives were not enough to handle 500 servers saving data. So we started to look at all-disk backup, because we could do a lot of concurrent jobs.”
Weston led the changeover from the old system to a new one that included Symantec-Veritas NetBackup 6.0 (to run on all 500 servers running both Windows and Unix), new NetApp storage servers (providing about 12 terabytes of usable storage), Sun-StorageTek TL 700E storage servers and 12 Tandberg LT02 high-speed tape drives with a Fibre Channel connection to NetBackup.
“We moved the biggest and slowest [server] offenders from tape drives to disk backup … and about 30 to 40 percent of our entire backup volume to NetApp,” Weston said.
“As a result, we are meeting our backup window limitations over the weekend now, and its a pretty redundant backup scheme—with one onsite copy of everything, one copy of all off-site data, and one copy of everything for the vault [Iron Mountain physical storage].”
Weston said that they intend to purchase more NetApp disk storage as time goes on, but that “no one solution can solve all problems. Were happy with our hybrid solution now, but were still exploring other options that are available, too,” he said.
For more information on the virtual trade show, including the speaker lineup, session overviews, and registration, go here.