MSN Selects Legato NetWorker

Microsoft Network (MSN) Selects Legato NetWorker® for Windows NT as Their Backup/Recover Solution

Technical Article By: Eric Harrison, Legato Systems Engineer, Seattle, Washington

Industry: Online Internet Service
Computing Environment: 100-Client NT Network, 750GB data, 3 million files
Business Challenge: High-performance, centralized solution for protecting 750 GB of distributed NT data.
Legato Products: NetWorker for Windows NT, Network Edition, Autochanger Sofware Module, 100-Client Connection.

Overview

Microsoft Corporation has adopted Legato NetWorker® as their internal storage management tool for protecting data on the Microsoft Network (MSN), the third-largest online service worldwide and the first Internet online service, which offers reliable Internet access, high quality information, entertainment, and communications on the Internet. It is currently based on many distributed Microsoft Windows NT® servers and Microsoft Internet Information Server® software, and encompasses several terabytes of information.

Key Selection Criteria

MSN's initial challenge was to back up 750 gigabytes (GB) of data as quickly and efficiently as possible. After a thorough product evaluation, Legato NetWorker for Windows NT and the ADIC Scalar 458 were selected. NetWorker's high performance parallelism and flexible integration with the existing MSN systems management and pre-and post- batch processing environments were among key selection criteria.

Key NetWorker Benefits

MSN determined NetWorker's advanced media management features to be desirable. To enable the operations staff to effectively manage media and save set data, MSN employed NetWorker's automated save-set cloning feature, its highly configurable media pools, the media bar code label support, and support for ADIC's Scalar 458 multiple cartridge access ports.

For some backups, the NetWorker client/server storage management software is run from the client side as a command line save, allowing NetWorker processes to be integrated into existing data center background batch procedures. Tasks required included Microsoft SQL database dumps, and the backup of the dump data, conditional upon its successful completion. This enabled MSN to de-couple pre- and post-processing scheduling from NetWorker's scheduler to maintain continuity with their existing batch environment.

The NetWorker server serves as the engine to multiplex and index up to 32 simultaneous streams of client data to backup media. Over a hundred clients (a mix of Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 servers) will be backed up in a night at either full or incremental levels. Most of the clients contain large volumes of data and up to 3 million files. The NetWorker backup server is hosted on a Compaq® 4500 with quad Pentium/133Mhz®, a dedicated 10GB disk volume for NetWorker indexes, and DEC® FDDI interconnecting clients and servers. This high performance environment supports NetWorker's ability to process the volume of data up to the wire speed. Save sets from clients are placed into different media pools according to MSN defined data retention times enabling quick identification of media.

Automatic save set cloning creates redundant data on MSN defined clone pools for off- site storage. This process happens after nightly backups are finished, and is performed entirely as a server side media process. Benefits include fault tolerance, redundant protection and recover performance due to not having to recall media to service a recovery.

To manage the complex data environment MSN relies on detailed reports generated by NetWorker's Savegroup completion notification system as well as batch environment reports. To generate detailed reports MSN queries databases with provided tools. Central recovery is done by directed recovers and the NetWorker recover browser. Browsing recoverable data from the NetWorker on-line index, based on backup time, eliminates operators from having to manually re-constitute data from several full and incremental backups.

Overall, NetWorker has found a match in the MSN environment by providing high-performance, centralized backup and recover, advanced media management, and flexible integration into existing management processes.