5 Reasons Your Storage

Snapshots Arent Working

DESPITE THE EFFICIENCY BENEFITS OF HARDWARE ARRAY-BASED
SNAPSHOTS, THEIR COMPLEXITIES POSE IT WITH MANY CHALLENGES.
Snapshot-based data protection solutions were supposed to solve our backup challenges,
werent they? Then why are your backups still broken? If your snapshots are manuallymanaged or of the build-it-yourself variety, there may be several reasons that they arent
working very well.

REASON 1 VMS AND MAJOR UPGRADES

Virtual machines (VMs), along with application or operating system
upgrades, are the first major place that snapshot issues typically arise.
VMs are often used to accelerate application deployments, but a scripted
array snapshot plan can actually extend the deployment time. VMs add
a layer of complexity to the data protection environment. If you have
multiple different VMs on each LUN, how do you plan snapshots?
Any major change to the environment can, and often does, break
manual snapshot processes. For example, the operating system may
be upgraded, or the application itself may need upgrading, requiring an
update to script parameters.
Commvault IntelliSnap technology resolves these problems. First,
IntelliSnap software has hypervisor integration for both VMware and
Hyper-V, so it natively understands these virtualization environments.
It also has an automated deployment feature on applications, and it has
built-in integration for applications and operating systems. IntelliSnap
technology has already done the work to ensure that it captures data in
a way that is both application-aware and recoverable, and Commvault
updates application support on a regular basis.

REASON 2 APP / STORAGE INTEGRATION

Integration between applications and storage is another reason your
manually-managed snapshots may not be working.
Data protection solutions that require manual management of snapshots
must be manually integrated between the applications and the storage.
This is quite challenging, requiring a lot of separate steps and time to
implement, as well as both application and storage expertise. When the
manual integration is done, the scripts that do the orchestration can easily
break. Even a single missed character or extra space can cause a script
to fail.
Commvault softwares IntelliSnap feature fully automates snapshot
execution, with all standard operations built in. IntelliSnap technology
also includes a workflow automation tool for any custom tasks that are
unique to your environment.

What do you need to

know to make a snapshotbased protection strategy
successful? This report
by 451 Research offers a
thoughtful and considered
investigation into the use of
array-based snapshots to
solve backup problems.
The 451 Research Group:
Backup to the Future.
VIEW FULL REPORT1
PDF

REASON 3 STORAGE CHALLENGES

Another reason your snapshots may not be working is due to your storage
environment.
Manually-managed snapshot solutions are incredibly sensitive to changes
in storage systems. For example, refreshing storage hardware usually
breaks all of the scripts, requiring that they be updated for the new
storage. Changing capacity requirements can alter operations, as can
adding new disk shelves and migrating data to them all of these require
modifying and re-testing scripts.
Another common scenario is different vendor disk arrays. If this is the
case in your shop, that means different backup tool sets are needed, each
with their own set of scripts. Scripts are not portable across different disk
systems because each has its own unique APIs.
However, IntelliSnap technology even handles these challenges. In the
first place, an IntelliSnap solution is integrated intelligently with storage
arrays, which enables it to detect changes to underlying hardware, and
update snapshots automatically. For example, if you have an application
and you move some data to a new LUN, the IntelliSnap software will
automatically detect that change and update the snapshot request to
use the new LUN. Its a simple thing that really adds value. Secondly,
IntelliSnap technology can be used with arrays and models from different
vendors, eliminating the confusion caused by having to use several
backup tool sets. Operationally, everything works the same no matter
which storage system you are using.

REASON 4 SEPARATE ALERTING AND REPORTING

When the major functions of a backup solution are not integrated, or
are performed by different tools, its difficult to get a coherent picture
of the complete status of your data protection, and manually-managed
snapshots only add to the problem.

One obvious driver

[of using snapshots] is
that data stores have
grown to the point where
its often impossible to
back them up within
allotted backup windows.
Snapshot-based backup
solves that problem, but
even more importantly
snapshots provide almost
instantaneous restores.
DAVE SIMPSON
SENIOR ANALYST, 451 RESEARCH IN
THE APRIL 2014 REPORT BACKUP TO
THE FUTURE.

In build-it-yourself snapshot environments, different functions are

performed by different tool sets that are not integrated together. Alerting
and monitoring features are separate from reporting, which means using
separate tools for these functions. Scripts may not be monitored at all.
If your snapshot script fails, where does the alert come from? You can
integrate tools yourself somewhat, but again, this becomes vulnerable
to changes in the environment. Capacity planning is another important
function that is not implemented intelligently in manually-managed
systems: you are forced to manually judge growth needs.
A Commvault IntelliSnap solution makes this work by unifying these
operations and giving you the integrated tools you need for both reporting
and monitoring, along with other important functions like capacity
planning. Its all built-in and works across your application and storage
environments.
3

REASON 5 PEOPLE ISSUES

Funnily enough, the biggest reason your snapshots arent working may not be technological at all it may be
human. But that doesnt make it any easier to address.
The first area of contention is cross-team ownership, as snapshots touch application teams, the storage team, data
protection and virtualization teams. A single recovery operation can involve people from all of these teams, making
coordination a huge challenge (and if recovery isnt coordinated, it may be done incorrectly).
Another challenge with manually-managed snapshots is that recovery processes are manual and complex, with
only limited capabilities for granular recoveries. In these environments, people sometimes copy an entire LUN just
to recover a single file. Lastly, there are security concerns: its hard to ensure that each team only has access to
the systems they are responsible for. Access must be distributed across multiple systems, making access control
even more challenging. And there can be turf contentions when storage teams need to access applications, or
application teams need to access storage systems.
IntelliSnap technology handles these security concerns elegantly. You can delegate ownership across resources
and tasks, ensuring that each team cannot access more than they should. Even better, the IntelliSnap solution logs
all operations, so you can easily see all operations performed by each team.
Perhaps most importantly, IntelliSnap software automates complex recovery processes, so recovery does not
require complex coordination with multiple teams or specific application or storage expertise. Difficult, multistep application recovery can be done with a simple point-and-click. If the DBA happens to be unavailable when a
critical application recovery is needed, no worries. As well, IntelliSnap technology provides a granular recovery
mechanism, so that a single file or object can be recovered without copying massive amounts of other data.

All of these issues with snapshots point to a need for better snapshot creation and
management capabilities, to make backup and recovery more intelligent and more likely to
succeed.

RESOURCES
1 commvault.com/resource-library/5445a1203fab55441d000f34/the-451-research-group-backup-to-the-future.pdf
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To learn more about how Commvault IntelliSnap technology integrates the complex lifecycle of snapshot
management into one seamless framework, please visit commvault.com/snapshot.

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