Data Protection for Blade Servers

Hi, my name is Hendra Sulaeman from StorageWorks division in Hewlett-Packard. And today we'll talk about Data Protection for Blade Server Environment.

Blade archictecture brings about a paradigm-shift in how you deploy and manage servers.

In the area of data protection, many of the familiar concepts in rack-mounted servers can be applied in Blade Server Environment as well.

Let's look at three different scenarios, starting with a simple "Direct Attached Backup" solution.

In a traditional rack-mounted server, you can install an internal tape drive, providing that server with a direct tape backup functionality.

Likewise, you can install a LTO4 Tape Blade in a slot next to your blade server. And it will function as an internal tape drive for the blade server.

This scenario is a very neat solution for a single blade server backup. And typically, you will use it for a blade server that has the most data in it. The tape drive, being attached directly to the server, ensures optimum backup throughput.

In an HP Tape Blade, there is a unique feature called "One Button Disaster Recovery" (OBDR). OBDR enables you to recover your system disk from a single bootable tape media. That will improve your recovery time on an HP blade server.

But how about the other blade servers in your blade chassis?

Well, you can assign this server as a backup server, and expand your data protection to cover the entire chassis. Simply install backup agents on the other blade servers and configure a dedicated LAN for backup data transfer.

This second scenario, LAN Backup solution, is a cost effective way of sharing your LTO4 Tape Blade in the blade chassis. And with 2:1 compression ratio, a single tape media can backup up to 800GB worth of data from your blade servers.

As your business grows, you will likely need a more comprehensive data protection solution with bigger capacity handling and storage.

In the third scenario, you can connect an external Tape Library to your backup server, just as in any traditional rack-mount server. This will enable you to backup over 800GB of data into more than one tape media. And with a proper media recycling policy, you can backup into different media everyday.

If you are looking for data protection for your blade servers, these 3 scenarios are the most likely solutions you are going to deploy.

I'm Hendra Sulaeman from HP. Thank you.