DAN : A Data Protection Management Backup Reporting Solution
DAN (Dino Analysis for NetWorker) is a state-of-the-art, automated “health-check” solution for Legato (EMC) NetWorker.  It replaces slow, cumbersome and often unreliable manual inspections that are normally undertaken by consultants using checklists or in-house written scripts.  Now it's possible to automatically check various configurations and be prompted with intelligent suggestions for things such as changing the multiplexing value, adding additional tape pools or changing the backups to go to disk.  Hundreds of hours of manual diagnosis are effectively reduced to minutes.  More importantly, backup reporting is automated, allowing the backup administrator of increase the efficiencies of their Data Protection Management solution, or put another way, backup and recovery policy efficiency.

Distributed Systems have a multitude of backup requirements and possibilities, where users can backup to disk or tape, stop and start applications before and after backup, compress files, perform archiving, allow for tape pool overlap, include additional data (like including one file from a directory other than the one being backed up), set up storage nodes so that additional servers can own tape drives but the database is maintained by a central node, allow NDMP device to go directly to tape, take snapshots before backup, backup the disk backup to tape at high watermark levels (called staging), and so on!  Therefore it can be a very complicated environment to manage, which that can become inefficient and unmanageable very quickly.  Thus, the primary objective for DAN is to provide an automated and efficient solution that details processing characteristics, allow for the optimum utilization of current backup and recovery related assets.

DAN is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use solution that simplifies the management of backup and recovery for the Legato (EMC) NetWorker product, providing the following primary functions:
 

■	Comprehensive and automated reporting detailing NetWorker activity
■	Identification of day-to-day Business As Usual (BAU) backup anomalies for error resolution
■	Identification of missing or duplicate backup activities
■	Identification of resource optimization possibilities
■	Backup and therefore recovery process performance improvements
■	Safeguarding timely and therefore successful data recovery
■	Safeguarding regulatory compliance and audit process activity requirements
■	Minimizing the storage resources required for backup and recovery activities
■	Granularity of reporting for Management communication and technical analysis

DAN is a tool optimized for Legato (EMC) NetWorker usage, written by developer’s familiar with the NetWorker technology. Because each and every customer has different data, each and every backup environment is unique, and so a solution such as DAN is important to provide customers with the required information to streamline their backup and recovery processes.

Clearly recovery is always an inverse of backup, so it is impossible to recover data if it has not been backed up, while backup failure can occur for a plethora of reasons. Such data exposures are not acceptable, while optimum resource optimization is desirable for the smallest and largest of customers. DAN does not differentiate between users, large or small, providing benefit for all users of NetWorker alike.

Ultimately DAN empowers the customer to safeguard data security compliance, both from a regulatory and business processing viewpoint, by empowering the customer with all of the information required to streamline their Data Protection (I.E. Backup and Recovery) Management processes. The best consultant is an internal consultant, thus DAN provides an automated sanity-check for the backup administrator, allowing them to deliver business requirements, minimizing the burden of managing numerous Distributed Systems backup and recovery requirements…

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Simplifying and optimizing Data Protection Management activities.

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