Seeing is Believing, Catalog Your Data
By Karl Chen
I recently consulted with a customer with 8 NetApp FAS 2000/3000 storage systems with 500,000+ files spread across 4 locations. They wanted to improve their storage efficiency and data protection operations across their company. With data growing at 40-50% per year, it was becoming too difficult to determine what data was current and how many copies were kept across the company. Their NetApp administrators used NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault tools to automate data replication and backup, but meeting backup SLA times were becoming a significant challenge. In addition, they needed to better understand their storage consumption. We recommended that they deploy Catalogic ECX, enterprise catalog software. It searched across their NetApp filers and cataloged all of their files and VM objects. Several departments across the company had copies of the data, some with more than 20 snapshot copies that were automatically scheduled. ECX was able to identify them quickly showing what type of files, when the files were copied, how large the files sizes were and how old the copies were. Having a summary report allowed the administrators to simplify his backup, archive and DR policies to save time and meet required SLAs. They were able to identify that 68% of their files were important and required meeting their backup SLA, while 32% of their files were deemed as “old”and no longer requiring snapshot copies. Those files were archived. This customer is well on their way to seeing storage efficiency improvements by 30-40% More and more customers should deploy ECX to improve their data protection management.
