Reports from specialized tools that work alongside major backup apps help you predict usage patterns and troubleshoot issues.
Backup and recovery (B/R) applications do a good job of managing tasks such as job scheduling, tape management, library support, tracking backup data in catalogs and supporting a variety of backup media, including disks. But B/R applications fall short when it comes to advanced capacity reporting, predicting usage patterns, performance tuning, troubleshooting and cost management.
Because backup applications deliver some of these advanced features, especially reporting, storage managers often find it difficult to justify bringing in another product to overcome the limitations of their backup apps. Product choice is highly subjective and dependent on the storage and backup environment in place. Storage managers deploy data protection and recovery management (DPRM) products that best address the needs of their unique requirements and environments, such as increased visibility about backups, compliance requirements, reporting consolidation and a need to cover the entire backup cycle, including snapshots and replicas.
Douglas Bovie is head of infrastructure management at Orange Business Services, a global provider of business and communications services in Eschborn, Germany. Bovie chose WysDM for Backups from WysDM Software Inc. for its cross-domain reporting and predictive analysis capabilities. It gave him reporting
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data for all elements involved in the backup process, including EMC Corp.'s NetWorker, his ADIC libraries, filers from Network Appliance (NetApp) Inc. and switch ports from Brocade Communications Systems Inc.
A lack of visibility into backups for information technology and business process owners caused Mike Bollman, manager of server and storage operations at Enterprise Products Partners L.P., a Houston-based energy service provider, to use Aptare Inc.'s Aptare StorageConsole.
"We selected Aptare StorageConsole for its early support of [Symantec Corp.'s Veritas] NetBackup 6 and Aptare's apparent close relationship with Symantec/ Veritas," says Bollman.
Key features of DPRM tools
When considering a DPRM tool for your environment, keep in mind the following product capabilities:
This was first published in July 2007