Leveraging Data Reduction Technologies to Reap Benefits Similar to Data Deduplication

By Pat Hanavan

The rapid growth of data is driving data centers to become more crowded and causing organizations to face added challenges around storage capacity, power and cooling. In such an environment, backing up and storing duplicate data is not only time-consuming and costly but a highly ineffective use of valuable and scarce storage resources.

Data deduplication directly addresses these issues, reducing total backup storage needs by 20x to 50x compared to traditional tape-based backup. Rather than storing everything with every backup, data deduplication stores a unique file shuck or records once and creates a pointer to that information, reducing the amount of storage needed for backups and overall data center energy use.

However, not all organizations have data deduplication capabilities included in their backup methodologies. In these cases, many organizations can leverage their backup tool’s data reduction technologies to enjoy similar benefits. The difference? Data deduplication achieves high reduction rates because traditional full/incremental backup methodologies generate a lot of redundant backup data. Data reduction technologies reduce the amount of data being backed up in the first place which in turn decreases the amount of backup data being stored. For data-rich application environments such as Microsoft Exchange, data reduction technologies can cut backup storage in half.

Redundant Backups

Email has become mission-critical to organizations of all sizes. It is the preferred form of communication for most business transactions and the amount of data generated through email is growing exponentially. As such, IT departments must be able to back up and store this data and then quickly recover it as needed.

Traditional backup approaches require IT administrators to run at least two separate backups of essentially the same information, resulting in redundant backup storage.

The database backup is mandatory since the only way to retrieve all Exchange Server data in the event of a disaster is to restore the databases. But administrators must also be able to recover at a more granular level, including whole mailboxes, a single email message, a calendar item, a contact, or a public or private folder. If administrators want to quickly recover individual emails, folders or mailboxes, they typically have to run a separate backup of the specific parts of Exchange which they may wish to recover later. These granular backups, or “mailbox” or “brick-level” backups as they are commonly called, are much slower to backup but easier to restore than database backups. Due to the dramatically slower backup rates, IT administrators rarely backup all of the individual Exchange mailboxes and folders.

Granular Recovery through Single Backup

Data reduction technologies enable IT to eliminate Exchange mailbox backups altogether and still restore individual messages or mailboxes in seconds. One of the most effective data reduction technologies is granular recovery. Granular recovery technology provides the power and flexibility to recover any part of Exchange from the database backups themselves.

Granular recovery technology-enabled backups are able to recover Exchange mailboxes, messages, folders, individual calendar items or tasks since all of this information is contained within the Exchange databases.

With granular recovery technology, the backup tool collects additional information during the backup and places it in its catalogs. This extra information enables the recovery of single mail messages or folders from Exchange database backups sent to disk and/or tape with no need for separate mailbox level backups.

Enabling granular recovery is usually easy in backup tools that include this technology feature. An IT administrator simply checks an option to enable granular recovery and then chooses which Exchange storage groups to back up. By eliminating the redundant mailbox backups, granular recovery technology is a nearly effortless strategy for making the most of precious backup time and existing storage resources.

Beyond Incremental Backup

The benefits of granular recovery technology can be extended through the use of continuous data protection technology, another component of some backup tools. With this technology, granular recovery-enabled backups run more often to ensure that Exchange recoveries are possible at any time.

Continuous data protection technology captures all Exchange server updates as they occur. A full backup is completed once a week or once a month, and between those full backups the continuous data protection technology keeps Exchange transaction logs continuously backed up. These backup logs are consolidated into easily managed recovery points so that Exchange databases are protected up to the latest complete transaction log.

Using continuous data protection technology, IT administrators can enable their backup tool to make recovery points at intervals they specify. Recovery points create backup sets that can be browsed, allowing for easy recovery of individual messages or folders from a point in time when either a full backup or recovery point was run.

Each time a recovery point is made, it also truncates the Exchange transaction logs so that log growth is controlled. In addition, to avoid the creation of new complete backups of Exchange that require additional disk space each time a new recovery point is created, recovery points are actually virtualized to save space. The actual disk space consumed by an individual recovery point is only the size of the transaction logs that have been continuously protected, combined with the associated last full backup.

The combination of data reduction technologies, such as granular recovery technology and continuous data protection, can significantly reduce storage needed for backing up Exchange databases and mailboxes. What’s more, these technologies can be used to reduce backup storage and energy consumption across other challenging platforms in the data center, including Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft SharePoint environments. Granular recovery technology can also be applied to database backups of Active Directory and SharePoint.

As businesses look for ways to maximize existing resources, eliminate redundancies, and reduce energy consumption, data reduction technologies have emerged as a critical component of an efficient and effective backup and recovery strategy. By providing an intelligent, flexible solution for addressing today’s proximate and pressing needs, data reduction technologies will also help organizations as they face business challenges that lie ahead.

About the Author:

Pat Hanavan is vice president of product management, Symantec Data Protection Group. For information about the company, go to www.symantec.com.