5 Reasons Your Storage Snapshots Aren't Working - IT-Executive
5 Reasons Your Storage Snapshots Aren’t Working DESPITE THE EFFICIENCY BENEFITS OF HARDWARE ARRAY-BASED SNAPSHOTS, THEIR COMPLEXITIES PRESENT IT WITH MANY CHALLENGES Snapshot-based data protection solutions were supposed to solve our backup challenges by providing faster recovery, faster capture of data, less disruption to applications, and reduced costs for non-production copies. But according to ESG research, less than a quarter of organizations’ production data is protected using storage snapshots.1 So, why aren’t they more widely deployed? If you’re managing snapshots manually or with ‘script-it-yourself’ solutions, there may be several reasons that they aren’t working very well.
1 Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017 Trends in Data Protection Modernization, to be published
REASON 1 – INTEGRATION: OVERCOMING COMPLEXITY The first hardware snapshot challenge is integrating snapshots into your environment. Applications, operating systems (OSes), hypervisors for virtualized applications, and storage platforms all have components that must be built into a snapshot management process to ensure everything works together. Each combination of application, OS, hypervisor, and storage requires a unique combination of tools and scripts to implement, as well as cross-functional staffing expertise, which makes managing scripts time-consuming and complicated. As your environment grows, the level of complexity you must manage multiplies. Commvault IntelliSnap® technology – which automates and orchestrates snapshot management and lifecycle management across multiple storage arrays using a single console – resolves this issue with the industry’s broadest native integrated support for hypervisors,2 OSes,3 enterprise applications,2 and storage arrays.4 This means no more building and maintaining scripts to integrate between applications and storage, which saves you valuable time. IntelliSnap technology is designed to capture data that is both application-aware and recoverable, and Commvault constantly updates application and storage support to provide maximum deployment flexibility.
REASON 2 – AUTOMATION: THE ANTIDOTE TO SCRIPTS While native snapshot integration support is great, you don’t have time or budget for someone to manually click a snapshot button each time you want to create a snapshot, so you need to automate the process. This usually means creating and maintaining complex scripts, which as we’ve established, requires your staff to learn how to integrate different toolsets from different vendors. Also, you want the ability to schedule the snapshots because having someone manually run scripts 24x7 is no better than pressing a snapshot button. Once you have scheduling solved, you also need to consider snapshot retention. Most storage arrays have limited retention options that may not meet your needs. If you need anything more than the basics (e.g., keeping only some of the snapshots you take during a day), you have to build that, too. Commvault IntelliSnap technology fully automates and orchestrates snapshot operations using policy-based management, and workflow automation covers any custom tasks that are unique to your environment. This frees up valuable IT resources, helps ensure consistent and timely snapshots, and reduces the likelihood of errors.
2
2 commvau.lt/2sAZsaG
3 commvau.lt/2rEEv9S
4 commvau.lt/2rnXupX
ESG Brief: Why You Still Need Backup Snapshots provide faster IT resiliency than legacy backup approaches, making them more agile for recovery purposes. This ESG Brief provides information on how snapshots complement traditional backup methods.
commvau.lt/2tvsEMF
REASON 3 – CHANGES: NAVIGATING THROUGH CHAOS The only constant in most organizations is change. Your solution may work today, but invariably you will add storage as data grows, upgrade and patch applications and OSes, virtualize your application(s), refresh storage hardware, and/or swap out your storage entirely. All of these are normal events in the life of an application, and all of them drive changes to the snapshot management process. Specifically, each of these changes requires you to update scripts to ensure the snapshots keep working. But, once you get beyond a handful of applications on a single storage system, you have to maintain so many scripts that keeping up with changes becomes difficult and expensive. Even in a small environment, you can easily have dozens of scripts that have to be kept up to date. For example, changes in storage systems can impact many applications at once. Refreshing storage hardware usually requires updating each script for the new storage. Something as simple as a missed character or extra space can cause any of these scripts to fail. A failure you may not realize until you try to recover from the snapshot that doesn’t exist, when it is too late and a bad situation is now worse. Commvault IntelliSnap technology addresses these challenges with native integrated storage array support, which automatically detects changes to underlying storage. For example, if you have an application and you add a new logical unit number (LUN), the IntelliSnap software will automatically detect that new LUN and include it in the snapshot request, with no configuration changes. This simplicity adds real value. IntelliSnap technology can also be used with different vendors’ storage arrays and models, eliminating the need for multiple backup tool sets. Operationally, everything works the same no matter which storage system or applications you are using, and everything is orchestrated with a single tool.
REASON 4 – VISIBILITY: YOU CAN’T MANAGE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE Visibility is a challenge for a homegrown snapshot management process. You need to be able to monitor snapshots so you know when things are working or when there are issues. You also need alerts to notify you when something didn’t work so you can fix it right away. And ideally you need reporting to show management how effective the solution is. Yet in many custom snapshot environments, alerting and monitoring are separate from reporting, requiring separate tools for each function. Or scripts may not be monitored at all. You can try to integrate these functions manually in your scripts, but this just means more complexity to manage. Commvault IntelliSnap technology unifies these operations giving you the integrated tool you need for both reporting and monitoring, along with other important functions like capacity planning. All of the capabilities are built-in and work across your diverse application and storage environments to improve visibility and simplify management, eliminating the need for multiple tool sets.
REASON 5 – PEOPLE: MAINTAINING PROPER BOUNDARIES Sadly, the biggest reason your manual snapshots may not be working may have nothing to do with technology at all – it may be personnel related. This usually falls into one of two buckets. The first is expertise. Most enterprises don’t have a single team managing all the different components of an application that need to be integrated in a snapshot management solution. Typically there are silos (e.g., storage, OS, applications, virtualization). You don’t expect a storage expert to know how to manage applications and hypervisors, and vice versa.
3
Nobody has perfect knowledge to write scripts by themselves, so cross-team collaboration and ownership are required, which increases complexity and risk. For example, a single recovery operation can involve people from all of these teams, making coordination a time-consuming challenge that increases recovery time. And if recovery isn’t coordinated, it may be done incorrectly or extend the time the application is out of service. The second area where people impact snapshots is security. You want to ensure that each team only has access to the systems for which they are responsible. In other words, you don’t want DBAs accessing storage or storage admins managing databases. You want to maintain security boundaries from an access control standpoint while still maintaining your functional process (i.e., DBAs stick to databases and storage admins stick to storage). This helps avoid unnecessary access from one group to another group’s systems and the risk that comes with it. Unfortunately, working within these boundaries for a scripted solution is difficult, and many companies choose to compromise security to avoid the complexity of properly separating and securing access. IntelliSnap technology addresses these security concerns elegantly. Using automated policies, you can delegate ownership across resources and tasks, providing control and self-service access to the right people at the right time, without giving people direct access to the infrastructure. Additionally, IntelliSnap technology logs all activities so you can easily track and view the operations performed by each team. Perhaps most importantly, IntelliSnap software automates complex recovery processes to eliminate coordination between multiple teams or specific application or storage expertise. Difficult, multi-step application recovery can be done by one person with a simple point and click. If the DBA is unavailable when a critical application recovery is needed, no worries. Plus, IntelliSnap technology provides a granular recovery mechanism, so you can recover a single file or object without copying or crawling through massive amounts of unnecessary data.
All of the issues discussed in this paper point to a need for better snapshot creation and management capabilities to reduce complexity and increase the likelihood of success. IntelliSnap technology’s policybased automation and orchestration capabilities eliminate many of the scripting challenges associated with manually-managed hardware array-based snapshots, which helps you accelerate recovery and access, simplify management, minimize risk, and scale more easily.
Commvault helps enterprises overcome the traditional challenges associated with snapshot recovery workflows, indexing and integration with applications and virtual machines. Learn more at commvault.com/snapshots. © 2017 Commvault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Commvault, Commvault and logo, the “C hexagon” logo, Commvault Systems, Commvault OnePass, CommServe, CommCell, IntelliSnap, Commvault Edge, and Edge Drive, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Commvault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
COMMVAULT.COM | 888.746.3849 | [email protected] © 2017 COMMVAULT SYSTEMS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
1 Enterprise Strategy Group, 2017 Trends in Data Protection Modernization, to be published
REASON 1 – INTEGRATION: OVERCOMING COMPLEXITY The first hardware snapshot challenge is integrating snapshots into your environment. Applications, operating systems (OSes), hypervisors for virtualized applications, and storage platforms all have components that must be built into a snapshot management process to ensure everything works together. Each combination of application, OS, hypervisor, and storage requires a unique combination of tools and scripts to implement, as well as cross-functional staffing expertise, which makes managing scripts time-consuming and complicated. As your environment grows, the level of complexity you must manage multiplies. Commvault IntelliSnap® technology – which automates and orchestrates snapshot management and lifecycle management across multiple storage arrays using a single console – resolves this issue with the industry’s broadest native integrated support for hypervisors,2 OSes,3 enterprise applications,2 and storage arrays.4 This means no more building and maintaining scripts to integrate between applications and storage, which saves you valuable time. IntelliSnap technology is designed to capture data that is both application-aware and recoverable, and Commvault constantly updates application and storage support to provide maximum deployment flexibility.
REASON 2 – AUTOMATION: THE ANTIDOTE TO SCRIPTS While native snapshot integration support is great, you don’t have time or budget for someone to manually click a snapshot button each time you want to create a snapshot, so you need to automate the process. This usually means creating and maintaining complex scripts, which as we’ve established, requires your staff to learn how to integrate different toolsets from different vendors. Also, you want the ability to schedule the snapshots because having someone manually run scripts 24x7 is no better than pressing a snapshot button. Once you have scheduling solved, you also need to consider snapshot retention. Most storage arrays have limited retention options that may not meet your needs. If you need anything more than the basics (e.g., keeping only some of the snapshots you take during a day), you have to build that, too. Commvault IntelliSnap technology fully automates and orchestrates snapshot operations using policy-based management, and workflow automation covers any custom tasks that are unique to your environment. This frees up valuable IT resources, helps ensure consistent and timely snapshots, and reduces the likelihood of errors.
2
2 commvau.lt/2sAZsaG
3 commvau.lt/2rEEv9S
4 commvau.lt/2rnXupX
ESG Brief: Why You Still Need Backup Snapshots provide faster IT resiliency than legacy backup approaches, making them more agile for recovery purposes. This ESG Brief provides information on how snapshots complement traditional backup methods.
commvau.lt/2tvsEMF
REASON 3 – CHANGES: NAVIGATING THROUGH CHAOS The only constant in most organizations is change. Your solution may work today, but invariably you will add storage as data grows, upgrade and patch applications and OSes, virtualize your application(s), refresh storage hardware, and/or swap out your storage entirely. All of these are normal events in the life of an application, and all of them drive changes to the snapshot management process. Specifically, each of these changes requires you to update scripts to ensure the snapshots keep working. But, once you get beyond a handful of applications on a single storage system, you have to maintain so many scripts that keeping up with changes becomes difficult and expensive. Even in a small environment, you can easily have dozens of scripts that have to be kept up to date. For example, changes in storage systems can impact many applications at once. Refreshing storage hardware usually requires updating each script for the new storage. Something as simple as a missed character or extra space can cause any of these scripts to fail. A failure you may not realize until you try to recover from the snapshot that doesn’t exist, when it is too late and a bad situation is now worse. Commvault IntelliSnap technology addresses these challenges with native integrated storage array support, which automatically detects changes to underlying storage. For example, if you have an application and you add a new logical unit number (LUN), the IntelliSnap software will automatically detect that new LUN and include it in the snapshot request, with no configuration changes. This simplicity adds real value. IntelliSnap technology can also be used with different vendors’ storage arrays and models, eliminating the need for multiple backup tool sets. Operationally, everything works the same no matter which storage system or applications you are using, and everything is orchestrated with a single tool.
REASON 4 – VISIBILITY: YOU CAN’T MANAGE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE Visibility is a challenge for a homegrown snapshot management process. You need to be able to monitor snapshots so you know when things are working or when there are issues. You also need alerts to notify you when something didn’t work so you can fix it right away. And ideally you need reporting to show management how effective the solution is. Yet in many custom snapshot environments, alerting and monitoring are separate from reporting, requiring separate tools for each function. Or scripts may not be monitored at all. You can try to integrate these functions manually in your scripts, but this just means more complexity to manage. Commvault IntelliSnap technology unifies these operations giving you the integrated tool you need for both reporting and monitoring, along with other important functions like capacity planning. All of the capabilities are built-in and work across your diverse application and storage environments to improve visibility and simplify management, eliminating the need for multiple tool sets.
REASON 5 – PEOPLE: MAINTAINING PROPER BOUNDARIES Sadly, the biggest reason your manual snapshots may not be working may have nothing to do with technology at all – it may be personnel related. This usually falls into one of two buckets. The first is expertise. Most enterprises don’t have a single team managing all the different components of an application that need to be integrated in a snapshot management solution. Typically there are silos (e.g., storage, OS, applications, virtualization). You don’t expect a storage expert to know how to manage applications and hypervisors, and vice versa.
3
Nobody has perfect knowledge to write scripts by themselves, so cross-team collaboration and ownership are required, which increases complexity and risk. For example, a single recovery operation can involve people from all of these teams, making coordination a time-consuming challenge that increases recovery time. And if recovery isn’t coordinated, it may be done incorrectly or extend the time the application is out of service. The second area where people impact snapshots is security. You want to ensure that each team only has access to the systems for which they are responsible. In other words, you don’t want DBAs accessing storage or storage admins managing databases. You want to maintain security boundaries from an access control standpoint while still maintaining your functional process (i.e., DBAs stick to databases and storage admins stick to storage). This helps avoid unnecessary access from one group to another group’s systems and the risk that comes with it. Unfortunately, working within these boundaries for a scripted solution is difficult, and many companies choose to compromise security to avoid the complexity of properly separating and securing access. IntelliSnap technology addresses these security concerns elegantly. Using automated policies, you can delegate ownership across resources and tasks, providing control and self-service access to the right people at the right time, without giving people direct access to the infrastructure. Additionally, IntelliSnap technology logs all activities so you can easily track and view the operations performed by each team. Perhaps most importantly, IntelliSnap software automates complex recovery processes to eliminate coordination between multiple teams or specific application or storage expertise. Difficult, multi-step application recovery can be done by one person with a simple point and click. If the DBA is unavailable when a critical application recovery is needed, no worries. Plus, IntelliSnap technology provides a granular recovery mechanism, so you can recover a single file or object without copying or crawling through massive amounts of unnecessary data.
All of the issues discussed in this paper point to a need for better snapshot creation and management capabilities to reduce complexity and increase the likelihood of success. IntelliSnap technology’s policybased automation and orchestration capabilities eliminate many of the scripting challenges associated with manually-managed hardware array-based snapshots, which helps you accelerate recovery and access, simplify management, minimize risk, and scale more easily.
Commvault helps enterprises overcome the traditional challenges associated with snapshot recovery workflows, indexing and integration with applications and virtual machines. Learn more at commvault.com/snapshots. © 2017 Commvault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Commvault, Commvault and logo, the “C hexagon” logo, Commvault Systems, Commvault OnePass, CommServe, CommCell, IntelliSnap, Commvault Edge, and Edge Drive, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Commvault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
COMMVAULT.COM | 888.746.3849 | [email protected] © 2017 COMMVAULT SYSTEMS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
