A mind shift in data protection

Agilent moves to disk-to-disk backup. By Tim Dietrich

Agilent Technologies is the world's premier measurement company and a technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. A spin-off of Hewlett Packard in 1999, Agilent has 19,000 employees, serves customers in more than 110 countries, and had revenue of US$ 5.4 billion in fiscal year 2007.

Backup challenges

One of our key research and development divisions is based in America in southern California. This division has about 30TB of storage and about 200 computer-savvy engineers.

In 2005, the backup environment for this southern California site consisted of predominantly network-based backup to tape. We had about 300 systems on the network being backed up to centralised tape libraries. To meet our SLAs, we were keeping copies of the backups locally so we could do quick file restores, and we were also duplicating tapes for off-site storage and disaster recovery. The whole environment was getting to be very challenging to support. Key challenges included; long backup windows approaching or exceeding 24 hours; backups were dragging down system performance; complicated management; low reliability; no remote office support; labour-intensive tape duplication process and increasing costs.

Tape just wasn't scaling for us. We were seeing huge data growth year over year, and continuing to address that problem with backup to tape was no longer getting the job done.

Storage infrastructure overhaul

We were already pursuing the idea of centralising the business data that was spread across our distributed systems down to a few storage devices in order to make it easier for the R&D staff to manage their data and to improve our storage utilisation and data availability. However, the real clincher on this strategy came when we spoke to NetApp and learned about SnapMirror and SnapVault technology available with NetApp storage systems. We knew we had found a backup solution that offered the sea change we needed to overcome our existing backup limitations.

We deployed a number of frontline NetApp storage systems – FAS900 and FAS3000 series systems – and centralised all our data on them for primary storage. We also deployed a NetApp R200 as a second tier, which allows us to use our FAS storage for what it is intended – high-performance storage – and use less expensive storage for backups.

Impact

The biggest benefit for Agilent is that we have significantly cut our backup times. In some cases, we went from 24-hour time spans down to minutes. The whole process of replicating data from the primary storage systems is pretty darn fast. Plus, it's nowhere near as system intensive as the old backup to tape, where you always had to walk through the whole file system, creating a big performance drag. SnapVault knows what blocks have to move in advance and just gets it done. By eliminating the backup burden from our servers and primary storage, we're able to truly use those systems to meet the business needs that we bought them for in the first place. 

If we had tried to scale our old backup architecture to meet the needs of all three sites, we would have had to invest well over €254k in tape hardware and software in order to meet our backup SLAs, and we still would have been struggling with the same old labour-intensive support issues that had always caused us so much pain. By contrast, the SnapVault-based backup solution cost us less than €190.7k to deploy, and reduced our support burden by about 500 person hours a year over the old solution.

Overall, it's just been a much happier experience dealing with this new backup environment. We have a lot more confidence, and the user population is happier. The IT team is happier. We’re saving money on the deal. It’s been a real win all around.

Tim Dietrich has been working in IT for over 17 years, with 13 of those years spent at Agilent functioning as an internal IT consultant. Tim was responsible for driving the project described in this article, including evaluating potential solutions, serving as advocate and IT architect, and managing all phases of implementation and rollout.