One recent back up & recovery installation for a major Canadian bank, consisted of identical hardware and software components at both Head Office and the Disaster Recovery (DR) site. The Head Office site consisted of a Sun Fire V880 master backup server with 4x1.2 Ghz US-III CPUs , 8GB memory, and 218GB of internal Fibre-channel storage for hosting the Symantec NetBackup's catalogue information. The backup server was dual connected to an 8 port F/C 2GB switch which, in turn, was connected to a StorageTek L700 Enterprise Tape Library with three LTO-2 tape drives and 228 slots. Symantec NetBackup DataCentre 5.0 was installed on each backup server and configured as a Master/Media server. Backup agents (up to 25) comprised of a mixture of Windows and Solaris systems, with online backup agents used for Exchange and Oracle on Solaris.

At the end of the process, Kanatek provided the bank with a blueprint architecture document that will be used by the Bank to roll the enterprise backup solution out across the enterprise beyond the initial implementation. The document covered the following areas:

• Classified servers with similar backup requirements and performance characteristics
• Documented the Bank backup and restore SLAs for the class of servers defined above
• Analysed backup and restore requirements per class of servers and recommended a backup and restore strategy, with a list of software and hardware options in order to implement each strategy
• Analysed possible backup and restore bottlenecks and limitations (network bandwidth, drive speed, SAN or disk I/O bandwidth, client performance, data volume size, database size, etc.) and recommended the appropriate strategy to overcome or reduce the impact of these limitations
• Defined a process that can be followed when adding a new server to the backup infrastructure. The process guided an administrator to choose the best backup strategy for a server based on certain backup and restore SLAs and performance criteria
  

In terms of Policy, Kanatek:

1. Configured and implemented management capability
2. Configures centralized management of both sites from the head office
3. Integrated Symantec NetBackup alerts to SMTP gateway for email notification
4. Defined and implemented different administration capabilities for differenet groups in Symantec NetBackup
5. Kanatek provided a backup and restore document that included:
   • Available Backup windows
   • Backup types and frequencies
   • Onsite Retention periods
   • Offline retention periods
   • Tape duplication policy
   • Implemented Tape recycling strategy

Kanatek led the process of determining, formulating and rationalizing backup policies. While the policies had to address the specific server configurations in this implementation, the policies took into account client-wide requirements and best practices (as much as reasonably possible).

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