HP Data Protector is a full-featured product that HP continues to improve on to meet the changing technology landscape. One of the most overlooked features is its reporting function, and how it can be used to answer some very complex business questions.
"I have been using HP Data Protector’s reporting functions for over four years and have used its reports to produce charts and graphs that help me forecast hardware purchases, capacity plan for storage, determine performance bottlenecks, and to provide database growth trends. It is unquestionably some of the most useful and interesting data I use on a day to day basis and in the yearly forecasting and budgeting process.".
You can answer almost any question you may get from a boss, an executive, or customer with two basic reports. The first customized report I run is looking at “Reports on Sessions in a Timeframe” and then selecting “Backup Statistics” for all backup specifications.
This report will provide weekly backup size. From this data I produce three graphs: growth trends by week, by month, and by year. This data can be easily be maintained in Excel using some basic spreadsheet and charting functions. From here, you can add trend lines and voila you can predict future growth! Here is the monthly growth chart, how powerful would this be to show during the yearly budget cycle?
As someone who loves data, I always like to find some way to get to the base data. In HP Data Protector, this base data is the specification metrics for each backup specification. To get this report, again create a report by selecting “Reports on Sessions in a Timeframe” and then selecting “List of Backup Sessions” for all backup specifications. As this data can grow significantly over time, you will need to store this data in a database of your choice (there are many free, easy-to-use relational databases on the web). It is also helpful to capture this data with a lag of a week or so, depending upon your purging schedule, you can ensure you keep the Data Protector database manageable in size, but also make sure you get all the session records.
So once you have the specification and session data stored in a database what questions can you answer?
Are the queue times increasing or decreasing?
Are any backup failures correlated to time of day, day of week, or number of jobs running?
Am I meeting my SLAs? How successful are my backups over a given time period?
Which group is responsible for the most backup activity?
Which group is growing? What is the growth velocity?
Which is the largest specification by size? How has it grown over time?
Should I expand my library?
What is even more fun is that I created a web page on top of this data which allows internal customers to review their backups. Within my database, I assigned specifications to applications and to business groups, but you can use whatever hierarchy makes sense for your organization.
For this fictional business group Marketing and for specification_two for April 2009 you can see that there were ten full backups all which completed successfully. The summary statistics gives an average success rate, total archive size, and total files. This is simply a customer dashboard, but for more complex questions or ad-hoc requests, I would write a custom query.
You can see how easily the specification data is extracted from HP Data Protector and how with minimal work you can start to provide visibility as to how well your backup strategy is working. And while I am glad that Data Protector now includes encryption with key management, deduplication algorithms, synthetic backups, and virtual environment support, I still think that its Reporting function continues to be one its most powerful and yet overlook functions.
About the author:
Devin York is a Senior Manager at Continental Airlines in the Financial Systems Group supporting many of the company’s largest and most critical business areas.