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The Whys and Wherefores of Failed Backups

This article is part of the Storage issue of Vol. 1 No. 9 November 2002
Despite all the effort storage administrators pour into backup, the sad fact of the matter is that backups fail about 40% of the time, estimates Don Schrenk, vice president of sales at Vyant Technologies, which makes a backup reporting tool called WorldView. The Enterprise Storage Group takes an even dimmer view of backup success rates, estimating that 60% of backups do not properly execute in networked storage environments. Why the poor results? In a word, human error, says Schrenk. "The guys forget to put in the tapes," or perhaps "they don't set a long enough backup window," he offers. Furthermore, a lot of the time, storage administrators aren't even aware that a backup failed - especially in multiserver environments. Checking on the status of each and every server getting backed up is sometimes easier said than done. Vyant's WorldView addresses this issue by installing an agent on each catalog server that reports back "to the mothership"-a central database with a Web-based console - every 15 minutes, says Schrenk. If a ...
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The FAS900 series breaks new ground in bringing together file and block storage.
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The Whys and Wherefores of Failed Backups
Despite all the effort storage administrators pour into backup, backups fail about 40% of the time.
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