ISSUE: How to provide data protection for business-critical systems in the face of rapidly expanding data loads and shrinking or non-existent backup windows. Solution Overview: Legato offers a modular extension to its standard data protection suite to enable “transparent” off-host backup and recovery of application hosts where availability requirements exceed the requisite backup window. [click] Transparent data protection is based on the Celestra technology which works by deploying specialized “power” agents on the application host. The power agent acts to checkpoint the file system or application, and create a frozen view of the data. This setup allows the actual backup data movement to be initiated from a second host. This technology is ideally suited for the SAN. It enables high speed disk-to-tape transfers, bypassing the application host. The data mover can be a dedicated host or an intelligent SAN component such as a hub, switch, or bridge. Alternatively, Transparent Data Protection is supported by our integrated solution with EMC TimeFinder or with Legato replication technology which allows off-host backup from a replicated data source. Proof Points: Celestra is a reasonable alternative to EMC TimeFinder for transparent data protection with the advantages of hardware independence and reduced storage requirements. This is exciting technology. Hewlett-Packard recently licensed Celestra (PR 7/7/99) to anchor it’s own SAN Backup initiative. Over 30 vendors have endorsed the Celestra data mover for inclusion in their SAN hardware implementations. SLT Discussion:[click] As you might suspect, transparent backup has a positive impact on service level targets. Because I/O is offloaded to a second host, the required backup window on the production host collapses virtually to zero (we show some backup window period to cover metadata movement). This eliminates planned downtime for backup and enables 24x7 planned system availability. However, data loss exposure and recovery time from tape is still measured in terms of hours.
