In the Old West, the cowboy with the fastest gun survived. Some cowboys modified or bought cut-down "fast draw holsters;" modified the weight, balance, and length of their sidearms, and practiced drawing their weapons for hours - all to improve their speed.

 Like them, with a few simple modifications to your backup environment, removing backup bottlenecks, and a little practice, you can successfully cut your backup and recovery time, making you a true hero in your organization.

Let's look at four areas that can be modified without much effort and help remove backup bottlenecks in the backup process.

Choose the Right Weapon: Tape, Disk and Virtualization
The cowboy would pick his sidearm carefully - and you have to choose your backup method and tools with the same scrutiny to have the fastest backup around. Traditional backup methods using tape alone can no longer be used to create fast backup. However, because tape is still the most efficient media for storing high volumes of data over long periods of time, and because of new government regulations that mandate specific data retention periods for many organizations, few companies can dispense with it entirely.

You can begin transforming to a faster backup and recovery model by combining the advantages of disk with those of tape. Disk becomes the first stage of data protection, while tape is for longer-term archiving. A common way to quickly convert from a traditional tape-based backup approach to disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) is by putting disk between the primary storage and tape and using it as a caching device, moving data from the disk to the appropriate tape media thereafter. This first step immediately speeds backup and recovery.

Next, you can use and maintain data on a disk-based system using virtual tape, which not only makes the data easily accessible but maximizes the space used on the disk, and lets you use your physical tapes more efficiently. Make sure that the virtualization solution you use is the one best suited to your needs. Various forms include Virtual Tape (VT), Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT), or Virtual Tape Library (VTL) on the primary device of the backup process.

Virtualization has another benefit - when file systems on disks are used for backup over long periods of time, system fragmentation occurs, causing performance to deteriorate. This is due to the constant writing, expiring, and re-writing. A virtual tape solution solves the problems caused by system fragmentation because virtual tapes don't use a file system; they're created directly from the logical volume management system.

The Right Holster: Networks and Connections
Many gunfights were lost because the gun never had a chance to fire - it was stuck in a slow holster. The right backup tools may never have a chance to perform if the network and the backup appliance's connections don't give it a chance. It's no surprise that the faster the data moves from the backup server to the backup storage device, the faster the backup will be. By making sure your network is appropriate for the backup speed required, you can save yourself a lot of headaches. iSCSI (using GigE) and existing Fibre Channel are ideal connections between backup servers and their storage. Simply adding an inexpensive network card to the storage device combined with a little system configuration will speed things quite a bit - especially on most high-speed corporate networks.

Another way to remove backup bottlenecks on the network or LAN is to use a different network for storage than you do for e-mail, file, print, and other business-critical software. We find that many companies still use the same network for backups and other business applications, and backing up over the corporate network impacts everyone's performance - including users' e-mail and Internet access. Unfortunately, the day of the nine-to-five job is gone, and most of people tend to work around the clock. If the network they use for business processes is the same network the IT department uses for backup, network congestion will most certainly occur. This causes nightly backups to take hours longer than they should - often causing them to fail and creating cranky employees come morning because they waited up all night for a multimedia presentation to download.

Installing a separate network for backup is relatively inexpensive - and worth the cost. You can easily set up a dedicated gigabit backup network and install a new network card in your application servers, buying yourself up to 10 times as much performance. Not only do you minimize complaints from night-owl executives, but you improve efficiency and save time on the backup process.

Modify Your Weapon: Fine-Tune the Software
Not only did gunfighters modify their holsters, they often modified their sidearms, changing the weight, the length and the balance of their guns. If the gun wasn't right, it wasn't used - knowing that the right tool for the job is the only tool to use. IT managers should use the right backup software designed for the system, environment, and process. In fact, it isn't enough to just select the right software, but you must follow the manufacturers' recommendations on tuning it for your specific application. We've found that working with a value-added reseller (VAR) can help you fine-tune the software. Most out-of-the-box default settings aren't recommended for the kind of speed you need. Not all software is equal - you'll find that tuning the buffers, caches, and block sizes can dramatically affect a system's speed and performance.

If one or more of your application servers takes too long to backup, you may want to look at installing a media server version of your backup software (backup media servers write directly to tape or disk) on those slow-to-backup application servers. By installing media server backup software on all critical servers, you can leverage the power of the software in multiple locations, making the process faster. With this kind of software, backup data is most frequently pulled from application servers over the LAN by a backup sever and written to a backup target disk or tape.

The backup data can be written directly from application servers to its disk or tape target. This way the software doesn't have to pull data across the LAN and saves time and money - all for the nominal cost of an additional software license.

Remember, if software sits on both an application server and backup server, you'll have to work with your VAR to fine-tune both places.

Using software to remove overhead is a time-saver as well. A large number of small files overwhelm a system if backed up file-by-file. Smaller packets of data tend to have just as much overhead and metadata as larger BLOBs (binary large objects) of data. Backing up small application files, graphics, and e-mail messages that have the same overhead as large files is a waste of valuable backup time. Small files moving across a network are also likely to interfere with larger BLOBs of data. Using image backup software to consolidate small files into BLOBs will make the data transfer more efficient, improving backup performance and reducing backup time.

A Trusty Friend: Servers and Systems
Horsepower isn't just for cowboys. If you're using a Pentium II or other older system, you should consider buying a newer system for backup. Backup is an intensive process, and older systems just can't pull the data from application servers fast enough to be efficient. By spending less than a few thousand dollars, you can significantly speed up your backup with a more up-to-date, efficient and faster server.

Using fast disk storage for application servers can help deliver the performance you'd like to see when backing up. External storage, including RAID, can also be a backup bottleneck, but to improve backup performance, use fast (usually external) disk storage on application servers. This will improve application response as well. Remember, backup speed can only be as fast as the speed at which the application server's disk delivers the data.