Dell PowerVault DL2200 CommVault - Manual (Page 8)

8
BACKUP-TO-DISK AND RECOVERY WITH DEDUPLICATION
ImProVeD baCKuP PerFormaNCe DeCreaSeS baCKuP wINDow reQuIremeNtS
Managing tapes is a complex, high-maintenance process fraught with the potential for errors.
Backups to tape often exceed their backup window, and a high percentage of tape-based
backups fail due to media or handling issues. Worst yet restores stretching over many tapes
drives longer and longer recovery windows. The alternative is a disk-based backup which can
run 40% faster than tape and restores which can be 90% faster, matched with overall increases
in job reliability that can be 20% greater than your existing approach.
CommVault’s Simpana software reduces backup windows even more than traditional backup-
to-disk software. Anticipating the low-cost disk trend and the need for faster, more reliable
backups, CommVault Simpana Data Protection was designed from the ground up to take full
advantage of disk and to simplify the backup-to-disk process. Traditional backup and recovery
software applications write to disk sequentially as though it were a tape device (one long
stream). Unlike the competition, CommVault Simpana Data Protection leverages the random
access nature of disk, taking advantage of the many read/write heads that allow multiple jobs to
be executed simultaneously. As a result, customers find that backup speeds are up to 77% faster
than competitive products, ensuring that
elImINate tHe VIrtual taPe lIbrary taX
Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) are point products designed to help mask some of the run-
time tape performance issues by treating disk like tape. However, VTL’s add a new layer of
complexity that often proves difficult to successfully manage. Virtual tape pools, virtual drives
and physical disks need to be created, provisioned and managed from a different interface
which has little to no real alerting and reporting within the backup solution. Restores are
generally faster but still sequential by nature and may need data restaged from physical tape.
Collectively, these virtual tape methods impose a tax on operations and locks out the pure
benefits of concurrent random access reads from a B2D target. The PV DL2100 Powered by
CommVault eliminates that tax by coupling all those key features into a single automated
solution that is built as a native, disk-to-disk solution.