LAB VALIDATION REPORT Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault By Claude Bouffard With Tony Palmer December, 2008 Copyright 2008, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................... i Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Background ................................................................................................................
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Introduction The Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault is a customer-installable, fully integrated backup to disk appliance that offers reliable data protection with file level data deduplication and fast, drill-down recovery. With CommVault‘s Continuous Data Replicator (CDR) agent, companies can protect their remote and branch offices while providing continuous protection of critical servers and applications.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Dell and CommVault have created a purpose-built disk-based backup system that combines Dell hardware with CommVault Simpana data protection software. The Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault integrates disk-based backup and recovery with file deduplication technology to help deliver fast, reliable data protection for small to medium-size enterprises.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault ESG Lab Validation ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault at a CommVault facility located in Oceanport, New Jersey. Testing began with a look at the automated wizard-driven deployment, configuration, and management of the PowerVault DL2000. Simple, Automated Configuration and Management In the ESG Lab test bed, four physical servers were installed with Microsoft Windows 2003 and Linux.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault selecting the ‗Automatic‘ disk configuration policy to allow the CommVault software to configure available physical disks for use by CommVault backup software. Using the automatic disk configuration policy, the configuration wizard found all un-configured physical disks in 3 the MD1000 enclosure and automatically created disk groups and virtual volumes.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 5. INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING THE POWERVAULT DL2000 Figure 5 depicts the deployment timeline of the PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault. ESG Lab was able to deploy, configure, provision storage, and begin performing backups within twenty minutes.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Protecting Mission Critical Applications The Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault is specifically designed to protect enterprise-class applications, as well as e-mail, files, and database systems created by applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint/SQL, and Active Directory. Along with protecting physical systems, CommVault also offers a full range of options for managing and protecting VMware-hosted virtual servers.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Microsoft SharePoint Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is an integrated suite of server capabilities that provides content management and search using a web frontend and a SQL database backend to manage content.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Microsoft Active Directory Microsoft Active Directory is a central component of the Windows platform, providing identity and relationship management for the networks that businesses, large and small, rely on. ESG Lab began with a preconfigured Active Directory environment and performed a full, single-pass backup of the active directory server.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 9. RESTORING A SINGLE ACTIVE DIRECTORY OBJECT ESG verified that Sally Smith‘s Active Directory properties were recovered correctly and the deleted user‘s profile was restored. Why This Matters The majority of organizations believe mission-critical data is at risk. In fact, ESG has found that more than 50% of organizations surveyed worry that their backup schedules leave some data exposed to potential 4 loss.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Deduplication CommVault deduplication uses Single Instance Store (SIS) to reduce the capacity required to store backed up file data. To illustrate the power of data deduplication technology, consider the example shown in Figure 10. Redundant copies of files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF) are included in a backup set.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault The results are shown in Figure 11, with capacity savings measured for the first four backup jobs shown in a solid line. The projected (dotted line) reduction rate for twenty backups retained on the DL2000 over thirty days is approximately 97%. FIGURE 11. COMMVAULT SIS DEDUPLICATION SAVINGS ESG Lab ran backups of the same data sets, this time uncompressed and without using file deduplication.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 12. POWERVAULT DL2000 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON What the Numbers Mean The total amount of data that CommVault software would have sent to disk over the course of thirty days without using file deduplication and synthetic full backups was calculated to be 613 GB. CommVault Simpana file deduplication reduced the disk capacity from 613 GB to only 21 GB.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Integration with Physical Tape In most backup environments, physical tape is still used for long-term storage and offsite archiving. Backup to disk users need to export backups to physical tapes for archiving with the knowledge that they will be able to recover that data if necessary. With that need in mind, the Dell PowerVault DL2000 powered by CommVault is available integrated with a Dell PowerVault TL2000, TL4000, or ML6000 tape library.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 14. DATA RETENTION POLICIES ESG Lab next used the Auxiliary Copy function to manually create a tape copy of an existing disk backup of a Microsoft file server. Once the copy was complete, the backup set was browsed from the tape and individual files were selected and restored to an alternate location.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Remote/Branch Office Protection Remote and branch offices (ROBOs) house a large portion of enterprise data, yet most still rely upon tape-based backup methods managed by non-IT staff. Non-IT staff performing backups and handling tapes increases both the risk of data loss and the cost of data protection, while backups, snapshots, staging, and archiving all significantly increase the amount of storage under management.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 16. SCHEDULING REPLICATION ESG Lab next kicked off the initial data synchronization to make the first baseline copy of the file system on the target appliance. For larger datasets, CommVault Simpana supports making the baseline copy to tape to minimize the amount of data required sent across the WAN for the initial sync. Once the initial sync completed, ESG Lab copied a 1 MB presentation file to a shared folder on the file server.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 17. PAIR ACTIVITY SCREEN Once the snapshot on the remote side was verified, as seen in Figure 18, ESG Lab deleted the presentation file copied in the last step. - 17 Copyright 2008, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault FIGURE 18. RESTORING FROM A SNAPSHOT Finally, the file was restored from the snapshot stored at the remote site. Once the file was restored, ESG Lab validated the contents by visual inspection; the restored file was identical to the backed up file in every way. Why This Matters Much of the information critical to the success and efficiency of an organization resides in remote and branch offices.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault ESG Lab Validation Highlights The PowerVault DL2000 was shipped factory-installed with Microsoft Windows 2008 and CommVault Simpana software. Twenty minutes after starting the configuration process, ESG was performing backup operations to the PowerVault DL2000. ESG was able to search and recover individual files, e-mail messages, and database objects using the intuitive wizard-driven user interface.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault ESG Lab’s View Organizations are struggling to keep up with the challenges associated with protecting growing volumes of digital information. Faced with a number of seemingly unrelated challenges, disparate software and processes are often deployed to meet growing backup, archive, disaster recovery, and search challenges. This can result in a maze of solutions, requiring separate GUI consoles, training, licenses, and maintenance.
ESG LAB VALIDATION Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault Appendix TABLE 1. TEST CONFIGURATION Hardware Software Dell PowerVault DL2000 Dell PowerVault DL2000 CommVault Simpana Version: 7.0 (SP-4A) Server – DL2000 2 X Quad Core Intel Xeon E5410 CPUs 2.
