UW Gazette, March 19, 1997 This article by Sam Diamond is reprinted (by permission of Plesman Publications) from the November 7, 1996, issue of Computing Canada magazine. Like so many organizations these days, universities are increasingly being forced to operate within ever-tighter financial constraints. In this environment, it has become critical to identify ways of minimizing the costs of operations wherever possible, even while improving performance of these same operations. Faced with this challenge, the Information Systems and Technology unit at the University of Waterloo in Ontario implemented an automated storage management solution that not only centralized and dramatically reduced the management overhead associated with backing up and restoring data, but for the first time provided this data protection functionality campus-wide. In other words, while it increased data protection to unprecedented levels, the university also decreased the costs of providing these services. The key to its success was implementing an automated storage management solution to replace the internally developed Unix backup utilities previously used for this purpose. Applied on a system-by-system basis, these early utilities suffered two major drawbacks. "With the Unix utilities not all systems were protected," says Michael Borkowski, a systems support specialist at the university. "And even those that were lacked central management. As a result, we had no reliable way to ensure that resources were comprehensively protected." In addition, the utilities all required operator intervention on the backup side - to load tapes and launch executables - as well as on the restore side. Thus, whenever an end-user needed to restore files, they had to contact an operator to complete the task. The solution that resolved these problems was NetWorker from Legato Systems Inc. in Hamilton, Ont. This automated storage management system has addressed all of the previous shortcomings by streamlining management of backup processes, removing the responsibility for backing up data from end- users, ensuring that all resources are always protected and empowering end-users to complete their own restores. The University of Waterloo first implemented NetWorker in 1993 along with a 120-tape autoloader. It only recently replaced this device with two StorageTek 9710 autoloaders. These devices have been added in order to meet increased capacity requirements and to segment storage management tasks for the administrative and non-administrative de partments. Each of these autoloaders is equipped with two DLT drives attached to its own NetWorker server to protect over 100 GB of data on Unix, Windows NT and NetWare servers. "With NetWorker's central management and scheduling features," Borkowski explains, "we have been able to set these systems up to automatically complete a full backup every three months, as well as monthcly, weekly and daily incremental back ups." As a result, all data is always recoverable. "In the worst case scenario we would require the last full and monthly backup tapes, three weekly back up tapes and a few daily back ups," adds Borkowski. "Since the system indicates the tapes required and automatically reads the tape bar codes, even this task is streamlined and the restoration process can be completed with minimal operator intervention." Labor overhead is also reduced by the system's ability to let end-users easily complete their own restores. "In the past," Borkowski says, "this task required a skilled operator who had to squeeze the request into an already busy schedule." The result: restorations could not always be completed as quickly as end-users would have liked. Tracking tapes has been further streamlined by the system's ability to automatically bar code tapes. This has become an increasingly important issue for the university as the number of tapes in their library steadily increases at the rate of about 10 per month per system. To optimize utilization of tapes, the university is also implementing a feature called media pools that lets them segment tapes used for daily incremental back ups from those used for weekly, monthly and full backups. In this way, they can recycle tapes faster to minimize the need for purchasing extra tapes. "At a cost of about $100 each, this is an important benefit since all backup tapes are automatically cloned by the system when full for off-site storage," Borkowski says. "By optimizing utilization of tapes and closely tracking when tapes can be re-used, we can further trim overhead costs." With growing numbers of tapes and increasing volumes of data to be backed up, performance is another critical concern for the university. Full backups are already running about 100 GB, and this number will only increase. While moving to a DLT environment has helped optimize backup speed, they would not be able to complete this backup in the allotted window were it not for their storage man agement solution's ability to concurrently stream multiple clients. In fact, the storage management solution is not the obstacle to faster backups - the network itself is. In the future, when the university upgrades its network backbone from a current 10-megabit Ethernet to a faster medium, backup windows will be of less concern than the network itself is. In short, by implementing a robust, automated storage management solution the University of Waterloo has been able to fulfill its need to completely protect data resources, minimize labor overhead associated with this protection and control operational overhead. With budgets under constant pressure, this solution has been, as the saying goes, just what the doctor ordered.