Northern States Power Achieves Backup Objectives with Legato NetWorker®

Industry: Electric & Gas Utility
Computing Environment: Client/server network with 3 Sun Solaris servers, 12 other UNIX servers, 12 Windows NT servers, and an IBM 3090 mainframe.
Business Challenge: Automatically back up 100 GB of data in less than 6 hours and an additional 250 GB of data throughout the day and night without impacting online operations.
Legato Products: NetWorker, Network Edition; Autochanger Software Module, Client Connections.

Overview

As new applications are developed for client/server platforms to replace earlier mainframe-based systems, data backup becomes a critical issue: with a new infrastructure supporting several applications on multiple platforms, mainframe-based storage management systems can no longer provide the high levels of performance required in a backup solution.

Northern States Power (NSP) Company (Minneapolis, Minnesota), an electric and natural gas utility servicing 1.4 million customers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and the upper Peninsula of Michigan, is a case in point.

"Streamlining backup procedures was a critical business issue for NSP because of regulatory requirements, explains Gary Voigt, NSP's Team Leader of Ancillary Systems. In addition, we needed to improve our approach because with our earlier mainframe-based system, customer service operations were interrupted each time the host was brought down for backups.

But now, thanks to NetWorker, he continues, both internal operational, as well as regulatory requirements have been met. This solution even lets us run backups at the same time as our new client/server Customer Service System (CSS), with no interruptions whatsoever to end-users. As a result, customer service is optimized along with operational efficiency.

Key NetWorker Benefits

Tape Streaming Boosts Performance

With NetWorker, NSP's 100 gigabyte CSS database is backed up each day in less than five hours. The system achieves this feat through its ability to concurrently stream data from multiple servers to multiple tape drives on two different autoloaders. As a result, NSP is able to beat their six-hour backup window and easily complete the daily backups that simply were not possible with their mainframe-based system.

"The parallel streaming feature was a critical differentiator for NetWorker, enabling it to excel in the objective performance benchmark tests completed by Talus, explains Bert Loveland, a Contractor with The Talus Group, a consulting organization that helped NSP select NetWorker. In fact, according to these benchmark tests, NetWorker performed as much as 50 percent faster than other similar products."

While performance is critical on the backup side, it becomes even more important when data recovery is required. With average losses due to network downtime costing $86,000 per hour, it is essential to minimize the time it takes to restore operations.

Online Scheduling and Automation Capabilities Support Huge Backup Capacities

In addition to the core CSS application data, NSP also backs up 250 gigabytes of batch files related to the CSS each day. "By having the backup system operate continuously on sequential increments of data throughout the day, NetWorker lets us leverage our backup capacity virtually exponentially, Voigt says. This continuous backup capability is achieved through the solution's ability to schedule backups on the basis of client groups, media pools and retention cycles."

One such group, for example, encompasses all of the CSS data stored on three UNIX (SUN Solaris 2.5) servers that support the Sybase databases at the core of the application. Additional client groups, each with its own backup schedule and media pool, are specified among12 other UNIX servers that support a nightly billing application, a productions support system, and a marketing reporting application. In addition, another group is used to protect 12 Windows NT servers that act as transaction processors for requests made by customer service representatives to the Sybase database servers.

To ensure that backing up the Sybase database servers has no impact on customer service operations, NSP first copies the data to a SUN Storage Array 210. This data is then backed up to tape in one of two Odetics ACL 4/52 DLT4000 tape autoloaders. Each of these devices stores 52 40-gigabyte tapes and has four tape drives.

Automatic Tape Cloning and Bar Code Tracking Facilitates Offsite Storage

Tapes in the autoloader are automatically cloned by NetWorker on a pre-defined schedule specified through the solution's central management console. All cloned tapes contain consolidated data: even if a given media pool backup spanned multiple tapes, wherever possible, this data is merged onto a single tape.

On schedule, clone tapes are offloaded via a mail slot in the autoloader and removed for offsite storage. New tapes inserted in this mail slot, as well as offloaded ones, are automatically bar coded. Tracked by NetWorker, these bar codes are used to track tape retention (how long a tape is kept offsite before being re-used in the autoloader) and rotation (how long data on a specific tape in the autoloader is kept before being written over) schedules. Schedules are established by the system administrator for each group to conform with NSPs data classification parameters regarding data criticality, regulatory requirements, and disaster recovery plans.

"With tight management control over every phase of the backup process, and an unprecedented degree of backup automation, we now can meet all regulatory requirements and minimize the potential impact of human error, Voigt says. Even as we add new servers and new applications in our evolving client/server environment, and expand the database of the existing CSS application, the seamless growth path and flexibility of NetWorker will enable us to continually meet our backup needs."

Summary