HP OPENVIEW STORAGE DATA PROTECTOR

A company's business continuity strategy will have to ensure the integrity of mission critical data in any eventuality, maintaining optimal service levels and the impact of a disaster on business is kept to a minimum. HP OpenView Storage Data Protector offers enterprise grade data protection and disaster recovery capabilities ensuring effective recovery from any disruption and automates routine tasks to reduce operator intervention. HP Data Protector is scalable from a single server to enterprise class protection.

With the drive for mission critical data to be available 24x7, downtime is not an option. HP Data Protector can eliminate backup windows with fully-integrated Zero-Downtime Backup solution for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). Utilising mirror and snapshot technologies of disk-based arrays, HP Data Protector provides Instant Recovery capabilities that enables recovery of terabytes of data in minutes, a sustained data rate many times that of traditional tape libraries.

HP Data Protector integrates with Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to provide backup of open files (e.g. MS Server 2003), databases (e.g. MS SQL Server and MS SQL 2000) and applications (e.g. MS Exchange 5.5 and MS Exchange 2000). This functionality is provided by per-server licensed application agents. VSS is in essence a snapshot backup which allows applications and users to continue writing to data volumes, even in the middle of a backup process, while the backup is copying data from a shadow copy of the original volume. To achieve file consistency during backup both the application (writer) and backup agent (reader) must be so called VSS aware and participate in the VSS specifications.

HP Data Protector offers an attractive unlimited licence for standard backup agents where local NTFS and CIFS file systems are required, i.e. non application agent or where no VSS exists. Backup of open file handles in these environments are handled by HP Data Protector Open File Manager (licensed from St. Bernard Software) and supports MS Windows NT, 2000, XP and Server 2003. File consistency during the backup process is maintained by monitoring all open file handle requests for read and write operations. A pre-write cache of all open files is maintained on disk. Again, a snapshot in time is provided by the open file manager to the backup agent. When the backup agent requests a file that has been modified, the open file manager substitutes the file from the pre-write cache. Any write request will modify the on-disk version thus not hindering the application.

Email notifications can be configured for backup administrators for mount requests, low database space, device errors, and end of session events for all backup specifications. Optionally, email, broadcast or SNMP notifications are possible for those end users interested in notifications regarding the success of backups on specific systems.