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Backup reporting tools can track backup jobs, pinpoint weaknesses in your backup processes and even tell you if a device is likely to fail.
Remember the backup/recovery salesman's pitch? "If there's a problem with a job, e-mail alerts, pager messages and SNMP traps will be sent immediately." It sounded like a great deal at the time, but as they say, "Be careful of what you wish for."
Industry analysts estimate that between 5% to 20% of backup jobs fail on a nightly basis, and the error messages resulting from these failed jobs can pile up faster than snow in a New England blizzard. Backup/recovery (B/R) applications can usually organize these error messages by nature and priority, but a storage administrator must still sift through possibly hundreds of messages to determine the problem's root cause, priority and remedy. There are an increasing number of backup reporting products on the market that go beyond the reporting capabilities of backup hardware and software, and promise to lessen backup pain.
B/R reporting tools emerged in 2000-2001, driven by new vendors that have provided most of the innovation and market momentum. The newest B/R reporting tools are multivendor solutions as opposed to product-specific solutions. They can also be found in storage resource management (SRM) products and integrated products (see "Backup reporting products," PDF link next page).
Among multivendor products, Bocada Inc. can probably be credited with pioneering the backup reporting field. It has since been joined by other vendors, including Servergraph Inc., SysDM Inc., Tavata Software Corp. and Tek-Tools Inc. In the next three to five years, you can expect some consolidation, most likely through the acquisition of smaller vendors by larger ones.
A second group of companies, including Computer Associates (CA) International Inc. and Veritas Software Corp. (now owned by Symantec), offer multivendor B/R reporting modules as part of larger SRM suites. In fact, backup reporting sits somewhere between B/R management and SRM. Backup reporting tools are logically a subset of SRM, but are tightly linked to B/R. SRM products may cost substantially more than pure-play B/R reporting products, but they offer broader capabilities for reporting and trend analysis on disk arrays, tape management and so on.
The third group of products includes those integrated with a specific B/R product. In some cases, such as with CommVault Galaxy, from CommVault Systems Inc., and Veritas' NetBackup, the B/R reporting function is a separate module offered at an additional cost. In other cases, such as with CA's ARCserve, EMC/Legato's NetWorker and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), the reporting module is part of the base B/R product. CommVault's QNet product is packaged somewhat differently in that it's part of the firm's QiNetix SRM product; however, it's specific to CommVault's Galaxy backup app and tightly integrated with it.
In general, integrated products offer basic functionality like event notification, success/failure reporting and summarization. QNet expands on this functionality with capacity planning, predictive analysis, B/R costing and a "recovery readiness check." IBM's TSM module includes health monitoring, extensive reporting and a DR Manager. While this functionality may meet the day-to-day needs of many organizations, SRM and multivendor products take B/R reporting to the next level (see "Which product is best?,").
The products have either agent or agentless architectures, and there are benefits and limitations to each. An agent architecture distributes a portion of the reporting app to various devices and spreads the workload around. Distributed agents can also continue to collect data even if the central server is unavailable. An agentless architecture eliminates the hassle of installing and maintaining agents on hundreds of devices.
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