IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

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HP Data Protector (Formerly Omniback II)

Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, has evolved over the last several decades into the new HP, one of the leading technology solution providers in the storage industry. HP recently launched a new data protection software product family, HP OpenView Storage Data Protector, or Data Protector for short, that builds upon and enhances their previous generation of data protection software, HP OpenView Omniback II. Data Protector adds new levels of disk-based recovery and additional features for service-level management as part of the newest release of the software.

The HP OpenView Storage Data Protector software builds on a foundation of backup and recovery software using distributed agent technology first acquired by HP with their purchase of Apollo Computers in the late 1980s. The second generation of this technology, HP OpenView Omniback II, was first launched by HP in September 1994, and had been continually enhanced and improved since then. The current incarnation of HP's data protection software, HP OpenView Storage Data Protector, was launched in June of 2002.

Methodology of Backup

Data Protector incorporates a flexible architecture that enables any combination of full and incremental backups that can span up to nine generations, Incremental-1 through Incremental-9. This is a variation on the traditional grandfather-father-son approach for backups. Typically, users will concentrate on combinations of full and a small number of incremental backups to accommodate their specific protection and recovery needs. Even though the power of up to nine levels of incremental backup is available, recovering a lost directory from that deep a level would require copies of all nine levels of incremental backups and the most-recent full backup, potentially a large number of tapes, and it would take a bit of time to recover.

Principles of Recovery

Data Protector can support a variety of disaster recovery options. These options consist of the following:

• Traditional manual disaster recovery. Reinstallation of the operating system, reinstallation of the Data Protector agent, and then recovery of the applications and data from a previous backup.

• Assisted manual disaster recovery. After a staff person manually reinstalls the operating system on the downed server, the staff person uses the Data Protector's restore command from the management station to automatically restore the Data Protector agent to the downed server and automatically initiate the restoration of the applications and data to the server from tape.

• Enhanced automatic disaster recovery. This approach uses recovery diskettes, or a recovery CD, that are prepared ahead of time using Data Protector to facilitate the unattended reinstallation of the operating system and Data Protector agent. The recovery of the applications and data can then be initiated in the usual fashion using Data Protector.

• One-button disaster recovery (OBDR). For Windows NT or 2000 servers having directly connected tape drives compatible with OBDR, Data Protector enables the creation of disaster recovery tapes supporting this approach. With One-Button Disaster Recovery, a recovery staff person can simply reboot the downed server while holding the reset button on the tape drive, with the OBDR tape loaded in that drive, and the server automatically identifies the tape drive as a bootable device and begins to load from that drive. When the process completes, the server has reloaded the operating system, applications, and data from the tape and copied them to its disk, and it is running in a fully operational state.

• Disk-image delivery. In a SAN environment, recovery staff can connect a recovery server running Data Protector to the boot volume of the downed server over the SAN; restore the operating system, applications, and data of the downed server to that boot volume from tape; and then simply reboot the downed server, which comes up in a fully operational state. In a standalone disk environment, when a server's disk becomes corrupted and that server goes down, the recovery staff can use a recovery server that accommodates physical disk mechanisms compatible with the original downed server to restore the operating system, applications, and data of the downed server from tape to the disk. Then the recovery staff can physically remove the disk from the recovery server, replace the corrupted disk on the downed server with the new physical disk, and reboot the downed server to come up in a fully operational state.

Data Protector also supports copying backup tapes, for the purposes of providing added redundancy or sending a copy of backup tapes off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

High Availability

Data Protector is fully cluster-aware; the management station, disk agents, and media agents are all cluster-aware components, operating as virtual resources within a cluster, and they fully take advantage of the automatic failover capabilities within the clustering software. HP MC/ServiceGuard, Microsoft Cluster Server, and VERITAS Cluster Server (with only disk agent support) have been tested.

Data Protector supports additional capabilities within selected disk array architectures, including zero-downtime backup. This is the ability to eliminate backup windows by automatically invoking an application-server-less, split-mirror, or snapshot backup, enabling 24 × 7 continuous operation without performance impact on the application server. It also provides instant recovery, which is the restoration of selected information from a split-mirror or snapshot recovery image on disk, rather than from a recovery image on tape. This instant recovery capability occurs much more rapidly than restoring information from disk, and in some cases, it can occur with no bulk movement of data within the disk array at all. Both zero-downtime backup and instant recovery facilitate 24 × 7 continuous operations, and are available out -of -the box, integrated with Oracle, SAP, Exchange 2000, and MS-SQL, across Windows 2000, HP-UX, and Solaris environments.

Key Differentiators

Data Protector's key differentiators versus other data protection approaches are its tight integration with applications and storage arrays to enable capabilities such as instant recovery and zero-downtime backup. HP Data Protector provides a healthy breadth of capabilities, across the range of operating systems, applications, and storage arrays, as does HP itself. In particular, since Data Protector can work with a combination of both local and remote mirroring software (in the case of the HP XP array as well as EMC Symmetrix), Data Protector can very easily form a part of a disaster-tolerant high-availability configuration, where two separate sites, each with clustered servers and remotely-mirrored data on external disk arrays, can operate in a 24 × 7 disaster-tolerant configuration while still enabling routine protection operations utilizing split-mirror backups. Data Protector's tight integration with the applications in such environments, such as Oracle, SAP, and MS-SQL, enables automatic and dynamic selection of the data to be protected to ensure that each backup produces a fully recoverable image.

As part of HP's industry-leading OpenView management environment, Data Protector has built-in integrations with many of the other components within OpenView, enabling the data protection functions to be managed using sophisticated service-level management techniques, and reporting on service-level compliance without extensive scripting or any manual analysis. These integrations with HP OpenView Operations, OpenView Performance, OpenView Service Desk, OpenView Service Navigator, OpenView Service Reporter, and OpenView Service Information Portal enable tremendous flexibility in managing an organization's data protection environment as a protection service, not just as a combination of tasks and technologies. It also enables protection service to be managed in the same way other IT services, such as servers, networks, and applications, are using the industry's most popular enterprise management environment.

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