Backup Appliances

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Intelligent Backup Software

How intelligent do we want the backup software to be? Well, let's speculate. First of all, let's all agree that backup administrator isn't the most appreciated position in the company. In fact, the only time we seem to hear any kind of comment is when there is a problem. In most cases, we find ourselves having to track down problems that may have been introduced by an undocumented system change thanks to a hasty system administrator who wanted to get his weekend started a little bit early on a Friday afternoon. We don't find out that the problem exists until backup starts at 10:00 P.M. or even later. Wouldn't it be great if the backup software could have some level of intelligence built in, to the point that it may be capable of re-installing backup client software, discovering additional filesystems, performing some self-tuning, and handling other tasks that we usually have to perform?

In today's production environments, we rarely seem to optimize the server performance for fear that we may stop something from working. The basic rule of thumb is, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' and if we decide to optimize, we hire consultants to perform an audit, which isn't a bad idea. But wouldn't you like to have a self-tuning backup server, or at least one that would email you an update of its findings so you might proactively make adjustments and changes based on the recommendations of the intelligent backup server? What about one that would periodically query clients to ensure that the client software is installed and that the backup server can properly authenticate to the client? As administrators, we would rather find out about the problems at lunchtime than dinner or bedtime.

What about true load balancing? Perhaps the backup servers in the future will dynamically load balance their ever-increasing data loads to the backup storage devices. Optionally, they would make some logical choices before the backup window opens and further refine those choices during the backup process. Or even, as previously stated, this intelligent server could email us with recommendations for load balancing before we allow it to make those changes.

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