How Scale Computing uses Scale's ICOS Storage

Webcast 2 of 3 – Using Scale for Backups

Bill Waller

Director of IT

Agenda

Who is Scale?

ICOS

Why Backup?

Scale Production/Backup

Disk vs. Tape

Virtual/Physical Backup

RTO/RPO

Scale Computing provides scalable, fault-tolerant storage solutions that are affordable and easy-to-use.

– Clustered storage with no single point of failure

– Network RAID 10 for highly available data

– Included remote replication for disaster recovery

Who is Scale?

Scale ICOS

Every Scale storage cluster is powered by ICOS™ Technology: an advanced storage operating system combining powerful features with intelligence that makes storage easy-to-manage, even for novices.

Generation 3.0 Storage

Scale-Out ArchitectureCapacity Performance

Density Agnostic

Unified SAN/NAS

No Controllers

Thin Provisioning

Global Namespace

ReplicationAuto-load balancing

Snapshots

Why Backup?

• Data loss is very expensive– Hardware Malfunction

– Human Error

– Software Corruption

– Computer Virus

– Natural Disaster

• Government Regulation Compliance– Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA)

– Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

– European Union Data Protection Directive

– Patriot Act

Ontrack Survey 2006

Disk vs Tape

• Disk and Tape both have a place for Backup/DR

• Disk-Based Backup:– Automated Process (No need to load/rotate media)

– Backups can be faster depending on amount of data backed up

– Restores are almost always faster (no tapes to find and mount)

– Scalable/Highly Available/Redundant storage

• Tape-Based Backup:– Manual Process (Rotate media)

– Virtually unlimited media size (via libraries)

– Small form factor (transportable)

– Multiple redundant backup sets

RTO and RPO

The measurements of data protection are:

•The acceptable amount of time spent to reinstate access to data following a disruption.

•The acceptable amount of data lost in an outage event, measured in time

RTO = Recovery Time Objective

RPO = Recovery Point Objective

Scale Production/Backup Environment

• 3-Node R4 Scale Storage Cluster (12TB)– Redundant Power and Network Interface Cards (NICs)

• Scale’s Production Environment– 100% Virtualized Environment (ESXi 4.1)

– Exchange 2010 (DAG)

– Windows 2008 R2 (Domain Controllers/Active Directory)

– Linux/CentOS (Web Site/MySQL/Atlassian Tools)

– 45 Virtual Machines

• Snapshots/Replication

• Symantec BackupExec 2010– Backup for Exchange 2010

– Backup for vmWare ESXi

Physical/Virtual Backups

• Scale ICOS SnapShots every 6 hours– Maximum 6 hour RPO (Restore Point Objective)

• Nightly incremental VM backups of all systems– Maximum 24 hour RPO

• Nightly incremental Exchange backups– Maximum 24 hour RPO

• Weekend Full Backups

• 180-Day Retention of Daily Backups

• Quarterly backups retained– Q4 backup becomes the annual backup