NetWorker Availability

Self-Restart & Self-Monitoring

NetWorker Availability assures NetWorker availability, essential to reliable backup and recovery operations. The solution offers resource monitoring, alert of failed operations and optional two-server failover. If the NetWorker server fails or becomes unresponsive, the solution will automatically restart the NetWorker server and restart the backup from the beginning of the interrupted Save Set. NetWorker Availability enables NetWorker configuration for performance and reliability, helps you plan in advance for more backup capacity -- such as adding Storage Nodes into a data zone, and you are notified in real time when critical thresholds are met, offering a proactive approach to managing NetWorker availability and performance.

The solution also provides process resource monitoring on the operating system the NetWorker server is running on, as well as process memory usage, available file system space, and other critical environmental resources. Sensors monitor the overall health of a NetWorker environment, periodically checking that all client machines are available for backup, and monitoring the availability of Storage Nodes, tape libraries and tape devices. The frequency of the testing and threshold values for each of these monitored resources are user configurable.

NetWorker Can Now Self-Restart and Self-Monitor Resources to Prevent Downtime

    NetWorker appears to be properly configured, but for some reason the backup didn’t complete as it usually does. Wouldn’t you like to know this before you missed the backup window?

    How do you determine the cause of a failure, so that it doesn’t happen again?

    As your backup environment grows, wouldn’t you like to know when is the right time to add more backup capacity – such as a Storage Node or additional backup server?

    How important is real time notification when critical thresholds are crossed in your backup environment?



Features & Benefits

NetWorker Availability monitors the health and use of the resources upon which NetWorker depends within a data zone, including:
  1. Server resources
  2. Device and library resources (monitoring for availability)
  3. Client resources (monitoring for availability)
  4. Storage node resources (monitoring for availability)

    In a lights-out environment data protection activity is maintained, by automating the actions to keep NetWorker running until resources can be adjusted.

    Over-time, NetWorker Availability monitors the health of the environment. Trend analysis of resource consumption provides real information about when Storage nodes or additional resources need to be added to the data zone.

NetWorker Availability sends an email or beeper/page alert, when critical resources cross a monitored threshold

Customers can easily configure these thresholds to the levels that are important to them, using the configuration GUI that comes with the product.

    This allows you to respond before a failure happens, by allocating more resources or by reducing the load within the data zone.

    Now you will have more critical information about what is happening when attempting to correct a problem, and the time required to diagnose the problem can be reduced. The impact of the correction is improved because you know what is causing the problem.


NetWorker Availability automatically restarts NetWorker services if they stop working

For most failures, simply restarting NetWorker on the same server resets the environment and enables the backup or recovery to continue.
NetWorker Availability can also restart NetWorker on a second server, to continue the backup or recovery in the event that the server itself fails. This deployment requires a second server, appropriate network connections, and storing NetWorker's index and media databases on a shared disk that can be used from the second server.

    You are better able to meet service level goals for backup. You can be assured that your data will be protected when it's supposed to. The solution is automated - your backups need not wait for you to come to fix a problem before they continue.

    It helps you reduce the risk of having to run backups at inconvenient times for both you and the business

    You can eliminate delays in recovery - keep the recovery moving even when failures occur without requiring any manual intervention.

    You can reduce the operational costs of storage management by decreasing backup handling by administrators


NetWorker Availability retains historical data on health and consumption of key NetWorker host resources

This data is kept for 150 days.

    The historical data collected is critical to planning, and includes information for:

      Capacity planning

      Justification for investments in new resources, before failures occur - such as deciding to add new Storage nodes to the data zone

NetWorker Availability will also help you avoid overspending on resources by over-allocating them within a data zone.

NetWorker Can Now Self-Restart and Self-Monitor Resources to Prevent Downtime

Key Points

    NetWorker Availability monitors the usage of resources and processes on the NetWorker Server host and provides historical usage patterns to help administrators properly configure resources on that host for performance and reliability.

    It can automatically restart a NetWorker Server, which will in turn restart the backup from the beginning of the interrupted Save Set when environmental failures occur. NetWorker Availability restarts NetWorker, which in turn restarts the backup process.

    NetWorker Availability provides real time email notification when critical thresholds within the NetWorker environment are exceeded - issues can be resolved before failures occur.

    In an optional two-server configuration, NetWorker Availability can failover NetWorker to a second server in the event that the first server cannot be restarted and the backup process will be restarted at the beginning of the last save set. When a failure occurs, NetWorker Availability will first attempt to restart the failed instance. After several unsuccessful attempts, it will start NetWorker on a failover server.

NetWorker Availability Monitored Resources

Monitored NetWorker Resources
Data Zone Resources
Windows 2000 Resources
Solaris Resources
  • Client Connections
  • Local Libraries
  • Local Devices
  • Log Filesystem Usage
  • Index Filesystem Usage
  • ProcPoolPages
  • ProcPoolNonpages
  • ProcPageFaults
  • ProcPageFaultsTotal
  • SysPercentCPU
  • Free Memory Pages
  • Free Swap Blocks
  • Max Filesystem Usage
  • Paging Rate
  • Percent Total Memory
  • Uptime Load

NetWorker Availability agent software resides on all NetWorker servers that will be monitored and managed. No special NetWorker Availability software is required on NetWorker storage nodes, clients or devices. NetWorker Availability supports environments running Windows 2000 with service pack 2 and Solaris 2.6 (2.7, 2.8). NetWorker 6.X must be installed on all managed nodes that are configured to run or to failover. The software includes an auto-deployment Wizard that installs all of the components that are required on the NetWorker Server in a simple guided process. Customers can easily install this product on their own, without previous experience.