Moderator: Welcome to our Real Time Vendor Connection on "LAN Free Backup Clears the Way to Your Growing Data Needs" with AJ Casamento , a Brocade Solutioneer. This Real Time Vendor Connection is sponsored by Brocade.

hbuchan482186: What does Brocade do?

AJ_Casamento : Brocade is the supplier/manufacturer of Fibre Channel switches to 21 Server and Storage OEMs.

rnendza352345: What is LAN Free backup?

AJ_Casamento : LAN free backup is the use of a SAN (Storage Area Network) to remove the data flow of a backup or restore from the front end LAN.

sjacobs2858: How fast realistically is my data/my company?s data going to grow?

AJ_Casamento : There is a REALLY good study posted on the Cal Berkeley site http://www.berkeley.edu called "How much Information" basically most of the customers I talk to are seeing a 40-100% increase in data over a year.

hbuchan482186: What are the benefits to implementing a SAN?

AJ_Casamento : The primary benefits of implementing a SAN include: Storage Consolidation, LAN Free Backup, HA Cluster enhancements and real time Disaster Tolerance solutions. In all of these, one of the major effects is the reduction of management costs.

srb124145487: Is it possible to use customized backup scripts in the San environment?

AJ_Casamento : In Brocade SilkWorm switches you can in fact use scripting as part of your backup environment. Most people use a tool like "Expect" to execute scripts against the telnet interface of the switch as part of the backup scripts and for the most part to control Zoning implementations.

igreen12722: How much experience does Brocade have in regards to SAN?

AJ_Casamento : Based on IDC/Gartner numbers Brocade has just over 90% of the installed port base in Fabric Switches. This equates to about 750,000 ports installed. So, we have quite a lot of experience in truth.

sjacobs2858: Why should I care about LAN Free Backup?

AJ_Casamento : Better utilization of your tape resources, reduction of backup windows and more flexibility on restore.

srb124145487: What are the main "gotchas" of LAN Free implementation?

AJ_Casamento : The biggest issue is the need for really intelligent software control. Remember, you are no longer using a backup server as the "moat and drawbridge" between your tapes and "bad" network behavior, you need good backup software to control the tape pooling and keep machines from stepping on each other.

aseguin5425: What about this "Serverless Backup" I keep hearing about?

AJ_Casamento : "Serverless" Backup is effectively the use of a SCSI command called 3rd party copy that has been in SCSI for years. The idea is that you can make a shadow copy of your data and hand ownership of it to a backup server or copy engine and get your backup done without taking most of the CPU cycles of the application server. This is a HUGE win for people in the mission critical sectors of your application base.

kissybird498106: Where can I learn more about LAN Free Backup?

AJ_Casamento : You can find some good write ups at http://www.brocade.com/SAN under SAN Solutions. Many of our partners have excellent material up as well, Veritas, STK, Legato, Tivoli and Compaq to name a few.

igreen12722: How much experience does Brocade have in regards to LAN Free Backup?

AJ_Casamento : LAN Free Backup was the hottest topic people wanted to talk about originally, though it has been over taken by Storage Consolidation now. I'd say a good 25% of those switches are involved in tape environments. So quite a bit of experience is there as well.

fmcintyre286448: Why can't I just increase the size of my "Shadow Backup LAN" from 100 Mbit to 1 Gbit? Won't it do the same thing for my performance?

AJ_Casamento : It's not a matter of the size of the pipe. It's the protocol stack you're pushing. For example: If I make you pass me 5000 sheets of paper one at a time, just as fast as you can I tie up all of your CPU power on just that function (you're not doing quantum mechanics in your head at the same time). It doesn't matter if I have you pass them to me through a 12 inch square window or a 3 foot square window, you're still consumed. Now if let you pass me 1000 sheets at a time, THAT makes a difference. You can move 1.5Kb per CPU interrupt on Ethernet (10, 100, or 1Gb) or you can move up to 128 MegaBYTES of data per CPU interrupt...your choice...but we had this fantasy that you wanted to actually run applications on your application server...not protocol stacks...

kissybird498106: How can I go about implementing a SAN or purchasing Brocade switches?

AJ_Casamento : Brocade doesn't have a "direct" sales model. So you could talk to any of our OEM or System Integrator partners about implementation or purchase. They are now available from ALL of the major server and storage OEMs.

aseguin5425: Should I move all my environment at the same time or can I take it in stages?

AJ_Casamento : Definitely do NOT attempt to design "Nirvana" as a first step. You are implementing an extensible network and you can (and should) definitely take it in stages. Go for your biggest problem child or pain level first. If it's Storage Consolidation do that with a few servers and then grow it, or extend it into LAN Free Backup as a follow on.

jobrien582478: Couldn't you just schedule LAN backups for off peak hours?

AJ_Casamento : If you have a small enough environment, yes. But for most customers there is no 4 hour nightly incremental or 12 hour weekly full backup window anymore. Especially for the on-line environments or multi-nationals. If you can tell me when sundown on the Internet is, I can tell you when your backup window is. To be honest, some of the larger customers have backup windows that exceed 48 hours. They are CONSTANTLY behind. So LAN Free Backup is a major focus for them. Data for which there is no physical backup is data at risk.

sjacobs233571: Where can I learn more about LAN Free Backup?

AJ_Casamento : Actually we are doing a webcast this week with STK, you can find the link on the Brocade home page under hot topics.

fmcintyre286448: Why do I need an intelligent media library master software for this?

AJ_Casamento : In a SAN environment you have the flexibility of using any free tape drive for your backup or restore, but this also means that many servers see the same tape drive, you do NOT want a server to interrupt another servers backup. Virtually ALL tape drives on receipt of a device reset will rewind and eject the cartridge. Trust me, this is NOT what you want to happen at hour 9 of a 10 hour backup.

forcani2208815: Can you explain in more basic terms how the process of LAN free backup works compared to more traditional tape backup methods?

AJ_Casamento : Sure, basically think of the data flow. In a network based backup, the application server reads its data in from storage (usually SCSI) into system memory and then converts it to an IP data stream which it sends out over the Ethernet to a backup server that takes the IP stream into system memory and converts it back to SCSI to write out to a tape drive.

forcani2208815: I've heard that the term LAN-free or "serverless backup" is a misnomer. That, no matter how much I/O is offloaded from the network, no backup can be completely LAN free or serverless. Could you comment on this?

AJ_Casamento : Yes, I wish the term Serverless was not in use. There HAS to be a server someplace that keeps track of the meta-data about the backup. What they mean to tell you is that 95% or more of the CPU load can be taken off of the application server and that is a very good thing.

forcani2208815: Could you give case examples of how much backup time some of your customers have saved by going this route?

AJ_Casamento : One of the largest ones that I know of is a customer that had a 60 hour backup window (2.5 days) and their first SAN deployment cut 24 hours out of that cycle (they happen to be in telecommunications)

forcani2208815: What are the unique infrastructure (switch, Fibre Channel, NIC, etc.) issues we need to be aware of when doing backups across a SAN that's on the edge of a network?

AJ_Casamento : Virtually all of the Server and Storage OEMs are moving their storage interconnect to Fibre Channel. So the HBA (Host Bus Adapter, equivalent to the NIC) is pretty much going in already as well as the Fibre Channel Storage arrays. So really the issues that you have are the Switches and potentially a bridge product to allow your SCSI tape devices to connect to the Fibre Channel SAN.

forcani2208815: How should we handle the whole interoperability and multiple vendor products on the SAN issue? What type of professional services/advice can Brocade offer in this area?

AJ_Casamento : This is one of the major reasons why customers look to an OEM or System Integrator for their deployment, so that the solution that they receive is certified. While Brocade offers training courses around our product, we are not in the professional services business. So you would deal with one of the OEM or SI partners.

jstafford390209: Are there LAN-Free Backup and SAN solutions for systems running on Linux?

AJ_Casamento : Yes, several of the OEM and backup Software providers now support Linux clients. I honestly don't know if they support it for the primary backup server as well, but I do know that some of them support it for the client side. And certainly for the storage array side (COMPAQ for example supports at least two of the Linux variants).

bsheets100904: What exactly does the SOLUTIONware "how-to manual" consist of?

AJ_Casamento : SOLUTIONware is actually a set of some 40+ reference architectures. Detailed (what HBA, Firmware, Device Driver code) are examples of implementations that a customer can get comfortable with.

jglossner30430: What security issues should I expect from SANs?

AJ_Casamento : One of the biggest issues for you is that some operating systems have an "aggressive" world view of storage (if they can see it they expect to own it). Brocade Zoning gives you the capability to create Virtual Private SANs to a very extensible level throughout the network. We are also working on additional enhancements that you will see coming in a couple of months.

gthompson217366: LANFree can work across all UNIX platforms then?

AJ_Casamento : Pretty much, the client side code is available for virtually ALL of the UNIX variants, as well as other OS platforms. The intelligent server code runs on a more restricted set of OS platforms. It varies by Backup software vendor.

forcani2208815 : I'm so accustomed to my backup tape system now and ATLs. How would I even begin moving this to a SAN solution? It's hard to move from what works, however painfully it's working now.

AJ_Casamento : I would recommend that you start with just a couple of your biggest problem servers and then a bridge product (e.g. Crossroads) to take just a couple of your ATL SCSI tapes into the SAN. Start small and get comfortable. Don't bite off too much all at once.

forcani2208815: What do you recommend for a strapped IT group that really doesn't have much additional IT staff or financial resource to get up to speed on SANs and LAN free backups?

AJ_Casamento : It's probably no comfort, but you're not alone. A LOT of IT groups have that problem. One of the things that help with the cost justification to get the services component for the installation is to look at some of the cost savings that the backup vendors have in their case studies. Also, if you have a lot of embedded tape drive servers (like NT) it can be a big savings in people not to have to run around collecting backups.

forcani2208815: Are there any good Web sites or white papers you'd recommend for learning more about this whole technology and the unique issues involved in backups across a SAN?

AJ_Casamento : Virtually all of the major OEM and backup software vendors have some good white papers up, as does Brocade. Check out: http://www.brocade.com/SAN for some pointers.

gthompson217366: Does it matter which tape formats or tape subsystems I use for SAN backups, such as LTO or DLT?

AJ_Casamento : Not really, you can use DLT, Magstar, STK 9840, or the new LTO drives. Some of these now supports direct attach Fibre Channel tape drives (LTO Ultrium drives do, STK 9840 do, Magstars do and Super DLT will).

gthompson217366: Are there specific ways I need to handle LUNs or volume partitions in order to make sure all my devices backup correctly?

AJ_Casamento : We always recommend the use of intelligent storage and host control. By that I mean a SAN aware volume manager (e.g. VxVM from Veritas) as well as LUN level masking at the raid array level (which most of the storage vendors support). I personally am not fond of persistent LUN binding being built into an HBA as the first "non-compliant" device driver that gets connected (and it does happen) has the potential to cause some real problems.

Moderator: This concludes our Real Time Vendor Connection with AJ Casamento from Brocade. Please visit searchstorage.com in a few days for free download of this transcript. This Real Time Vendor Connection has been sponsored by Brocade.