ITS runs full backups each weekend with incremental backups running each evening.
The brains of the Commvault backup system is the Commserve. The Commserve schedules backups and manages the schedules, policies and media. The Media Agent is a server that accepts data from client servers and then forwards the data on to backup storage media.
The Media Agent also works in reverse to restore data from storage to the client. We have two Media Agents to balance the client workload. As you can see, the Commserve also acts as a Media Agent.
How is data backed up?
- The Commserve initiates a client backup
- The Client sends compressed data to the Media Agent
- The Media Agent deduplicates the data and sends it to backup disk
The next release of Commvault will enable deduplication on the client. This means that significantly less data will have to be moved over the network.
What does data-deduplication do for us?
The dedupe engine examines files at the block level and only backs up the blocks that have been changed. So, if someone changes a single record in a 2GB file, then only the changed blocks rather than the entire 2GB file are backed up.
Last December, ITS backed up 104TB of raw data. That data compressed down to 50TB and was further deduplicated down to 15TB.