Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] calculating backup success rate

2007-06-06 14:59:30
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] calculating backup success rate
From: Peter Buschman <plblists AT iotk DOT com>
To: "'NB List Mail'" <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:01:08 +0200
DISCLAIMER: I work for one of the aforementioned vendors and am lead 
designer of an SLA compliance solution that calculates backup success rates.

There are several things to watch out for when rolling up backups to 
a percentage success.

1.) Make sure the reporting product is good at telling you what 
should have backed-up and when. Products that merely look at what the 
backup product attempted (eg., bpdbjobs) are susceptible to errors if 
a policy misconfiguration or scheduler bug causes the backups not to 
be attempted in the first place. You can have 100 out of 100 backups 
in a day be successful but that doesn't equal 100% compliance if 500 
backups are what your daily service level is.

2.) Success is not just the absence of errors (exit status 0 or 1). 
It can also include whether or not the backup was run at the right 
level, within the right backup window (for example, 10:00pm to 
6:00am), or with the right retention period (for example, daily 
backups have a retention of 2 weeks but every month, the accounting 
system needs to be backed-up in full with a retention of 7 
years).  The business often has a very different view of what 
constitutes a successful backup than the native backup product or the 
backup operator.

3.) Assets that must be successfully backed-up multiple times in the 
same day (eg., database transaction logs) need to be taken into 
account.  If they backup too few times, this can be considered 
unsuccessful even if those backups were without error.

4.) Some systems can, and should be, weighted differently when it 
comes to rolling up success rates.  If a once-a-quarter backup of 
financial results fails or doesn't run at all, it shouldn't get lost 
in a 99.999% success rate for less-critical systems that all backed-up daily.

Raw success rates are one thing but success rates that auditors and 
compliance regulations accept can be much more complex.

--PLB

P.S. I'm not touching the "which tool is best" question with a 
10-foot pole. ;-)

At 05:17 6.6.2007, Ed Wilts wrote:
> >>     Veritas Backup Reporter, on the other hand, is an add-on Symantec
> >> product that is reporting product that is designed to compete with
>Aptare,
> >> Bocada, TekTools, Wysdm, etc.
> >
> > Which one is meant to work best ?
>
>They probably all think they're meant to work best :-).  Aptare
>StorageConsole actually does work the best from everything I've read,
>studied, and evaluated.  I've been a long-time satisfied Aptare customer so
>I haven't down in-depth studies on the others in quite a while but back
>during my evals, it wasn't even close.
>
>         .../Ed
>
>--
>Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
>mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
>
>I GoodSearch for Bundles Of Love
>http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=821118
>
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