White Paper: End-To-End, Snapshot-Aware Data Protection With CommVault SnapProtect

By Darin Camp

Today's IT departments are facing explosive data growth along with service-level agreements (SLAs) for data availability and recovery that can often seem unobtainable. Because traditional tape-based protection typically captures data only from the previous backup event, a recovery request may mean a gap of up to 24 hours from the most recent recovery point—often unacceptable for business-critical data.

Moving the primary recovery location of critical data to a readily available storage area network (SAN)–based snapshot can significantly mitigate the risk of data loss. In conjunction with Dell EqualLogic PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) SAN arrays and CommVault Simpana SnapProtect technology, the Dell PowerVault DL2100 – Powered by CommVault can help organizations create an end-to-end environment that leverages native EqualLogic snapshots to enable fast, flexible data protection and recovery. As an integrated, fullfeatured backup appliance, the PowerVault DL2100 is designed to significantly simplify storage and backup administration and help create an advanced, highly scalable storage solution. By incorporating EqualLogic snapshot copies, the PowerVault DL2100 with SnapProtect, and multiple copy tiers into the environment as part of a comprehensive recovery strategy, IT administrators can meet the challenges of data growth while supporting aggressive SLAs and data protection equirements for critical systems.

The separation of recovery-copy, protectioncopy, and archive-copy tiers provides the availability and speed required for today's critical applications, and helps reduce costs by using the appropriate storage types and technologies such as deduplication to meet long-term retention requirements. Forming the foundation of the local recovery-copy tier, snapshots capture the disk layout at the exact point the snapshot is initiated, providing a point-intime (PIT) copy that can then serve as a reference for the other tiers. These PIT copies can be easily mounted to the Dell PowerVault DL2100 for nightly backups—thus enabling IT staff to use the same consistent snapshot for off-site recovery and retention copies on cost-effective disk and tape.