Success Stories

Agilent Cuts Backup Windows by 98% with Centralized Solution fromNetApp

CUSTOMER PROFILE Measuring change in many languages The cornerstone of science is measurement, which is good news for Agilent Technologies, one of the worlds premier measurement companies. Agilents operations are far flung to meet the needs of science, engineering, and industry worldwide. The company has manufacturing sites in the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Agilent has more than 19,000 employees and had revenue of $5.4 billion in fiscal 2007. THE CHALLENGE Until recently, Agilent was backing up 150 software development systems with directattached storage on a weekly basis by using traditional network-enabled client backup software. This involved running backups for each system and then duplicating all of the tapes so they could be sent offsite to a disaster recovery location. The whole process of doing tape replications was requiring us to log in on weekends because we needed to get them ready to ship offsite early the following week, says Tim Dietrich, systems architect, Agilent. We were spending 6 to 8 hours each weekend just running tape duplications. Plus, our tape backup processes experienced a large number of failures. A client would go offline and the backups would hang

up. This was requiring us to come in on week ends to correct the problem so we could continue with the backup tape duplications. In addition to the time required to run tapes, Dietrich was spending a lot of time on the ongoing administrative activities of main taining the backups and ensuring that everything was running properly. Agilent needed to centralize its storage asmuch as possible and get out of the business of backing up individual clients. We wanted a solution where we had just ahandful of storage systems, rather than having to individually back up 150 servers, explains Dietrich. We were looking for a hands-off solution that would eliminate the huge burden of creating tape backups and provide greater reliability for data protection. THE SOLUTION Protect Data with NetApp SnapVault andSnapMirror After investigating numerous storage architectures and vendors, Agilent selected a centralized solution from NetApp, because of its simplicity, ease of management, and ability to meet the companys needs. Agilent purchased five NetApp FAS systems to host the file data and one NetApp NearStore R200 system to provide disk-to-disk backup of the FAS systems. The company also

KEY HIGHLIGHTS Industry Manufacturing The challenge Reduce backup times, improve disaster recovery, and consolidate storage The solution Online and near-line disk storage withNetApp SnapVault and Open Systems SnapVault Benefits Reduced backup windows by 98%with SnapVault and 87% withOpen Systems SnapVault Saved $100,000 in unnecessary costs with remote backup capability Save 500 person hours per year Consolidated direct-attached storage from 150 servers to 6NetApp systems Gained faster system builds

 NetApps solution has been a lot easier and more cost effective for us to manage and has given us better performance. It also shrunk our backup timeframe dramatically.
Tim Dietrich Systems Architect, Agilent Technologies

selected NetApp SnapMirror , NetApp SnapVault, and NetApp Operations Manager (formerly NetApp DataFabric Manager). SnapMirror replicates data across four locations so that engineers can have local copies for collaboration purposes. (Replication with SnapMirror will soon encompass seven engineering sites.) SnapVault enables regular backups from the FAS systems to the NearStore R200. Three remote sites are backing up their data to the NearStore R200. To manage the environment across all sites, the company leverages Operations Manager. At the same time, Agilent migrated its backup software solution to Veritas NetBackup from Symantec. The company used NetApp Professional Services for initial training on SnapVault and SnapMirror and uses a NetApp Technical Global Advisor (TGA) on an ongoing basis to line up support resources. Agilent currently has over 30TB of storage on its NetApp systems for data that includes databases, home directories, and engineering information. We are centralizing our R&D storage onto the NetApp storage appliances as much as we can, says Dietrich. To protect the data on our NetApp systems, we run Snapshot copies frequently. Instead of backing up to tape, we use SnapVault to replicate the Snapshot copies to a lowercost NearStore storage system. We target a 60-day retention for the Snapshot copies.

SnapVault provides a much more hands-off solution compared to tape backups. Now that were running SnapVault, data protection essentially takes care of itself. We do run tape backups once a week, but we justsend them off to our DR facility and wedont have to duplicate them anymore. How often we replicate with SnapVault depends on the nature of the data. For less critical data, its once a day; for our most important data, we schedule it for multiple times during the day. Moving data from the FAS system to the NearStore R200 is fast. When we were backing up directly to tape, ittook up to 16 hours for the backup to run. An update with SnapVault now takes just 10to 15 minutes, up to a 98% improvement over tape. BENEFITS Open Systems SnapVault Protects NonNetApp Storage For the dozen or so servers that were not consolidated onto NetApp storage, Agilent isrunning Open Systems SnapVault to back them up. This software takes daily Snapshot copies of data on these systems and immediately replicates them back to the NearStore R200 for backup. Open Systems SnapVault allows us to use the same procedures on our non NetApp systems as we use on our NetApp storage

appliances, says Dietrich. Even though wewerent able to remove all of the directattached storage, our end users will only have to learn one process for restoring files. And the backup times for the systems that are running Open Systems SnapVault are also impressive it only takes an average of 2 hours to run backups. Thats still an 87% reduction in backup time. For disaster recovery purposes, Agilent archives periodically to tape from the NearStore R200 system. When we were justdoing tapes, an average full backup took between 8 and 16 hours, Dietrich remarks. First we had to run multiple backups to make sure they were working. We had to tie up 10 to 18 drives. Now I can do the tape archiving with just 4 drives. By freeing up those extra drives, we avoid having to buy additional drives in the near future. Additional data protection is achieved by replicating Snapshot data offsite. Because NetApp sends only incremental change, itsignificantly reduces bandwidth requirements. We dont have unlimited bandwidth, but we do back up remotely from three sites to the centralized NearStore R200, explains Dietrich. Just sending incremental backups with SnapMirror or SnapVault is a big advantage for us because it uses relatively little bandwidth. Being able to perform backups remotely saves us the cost of tape backup

hardware, software, and engineering support at three locations. It adds up to more than $100,000 in eliminated hardware and software costs, and also saves us 500 person hours per year of support labor. Improved data recovery and reduced reliance on tape The SnapVault backups are a lot faster, says Dietrich. This dramatically shortens thebackup windows. Its great not having toworry about coming in after hours to deal with tape drive problems and stalled backups. That was a big inconvenience for our team. With NetApp, its a nonissue. You never have to worry about broken tapes. NetApps solution is also helping us in terms of restores. We deal with an average of four to six requests for data recovery perweek, and tape restores are inherently unreliable. You may have tape backups that you believe ran successfully and you may have even validated those backups and verified the tapes, but theres no guarantee that the data will be recoverable when you need it. We ran into many cases where we wanted to recover files from a particular date and, for whatever reason, the tapes were not allowing us to restore properly. Thats not an issue with NetApp Snapshot. The NearStore R200s keep it all on disk. You just browse and grab it.

Application developers gain more system resources, more comprehensive backups The solution has also helped speed software development. The tape-based backups used to consume significant CPU resources, affecting the time it took to run system builds. With those CPU resources freed up,system builds now take less time. When we were running backups on Saturdays, any changes made during that time would not be included in the backup, says Dietrich. Since application developers often worked on weekends, they were concerned that they might accidentally delete a source file and not be able to recover their work. With SnapVault and OpenSystems SnapVault, this is no longer aproblem. Backups are frequent and much faster, and our developers know that their source files are protected no matter when they are working. Dietrich sums up the value of the solution toAgilent: NetApps solution has been a loteasier and more cost effective for us to manage. It has given us better performance and shrunk our backup timeframe dramatically. So, all around, NetApp has made our lives much easierand it has given us our weekends back!

SOLUTION COMPONENTS NetApp Products NetApp FAS900 and FAS3000 storageappliances NetApp NearStore R200 NetApp SnapVault NetApp Open Systems SnapVault NetApp SnapMirror NetApp Snapshot NetApp Operations Manager NetApp Services NetApp Global Services (NGS) Professional Services NGS Technical Global Advisor Third-Party Solutions Veritas NetBackup from Symantec

NetApp creates innovative storage and datamanagement solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

2008 NetApp. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. NetApp, the Network Appliance logo, DataFabric, NearStore, SnapMirror, and SnapVault are registered trademarks and Network Appliance and Snapshot are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Symantec is a registered trademark and NetBackup and Veritas are trademarks of Symantec Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. CSS-6031-0308

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