The Veritas backup software already has sped up backups for the utility. It used to take four days to back up a 3-TB Windows NT server cluster; with Veritas NetBackup, it takes just 24 hours, Park says. "And we still want to shrink that window even further," he adds.
Moreover, the new software will let Southern finally manage backups centrally, Park says. The goal is to have software agents sitting on remote-site servers and feeding data back to a central management console to handle outage alerts and other problems. That way, the company can eliminate as many local backups as possible and prevent backup-and-restore problems before they occur.
"There have been cases where backups were not as current as we would like them to be, which is not acceptable," Commer says.
Today, the company uses a mix of automated storage-management tools and manual processes, with spreadsheets that track the owners of the data and the applications that run on each server.
SAN and storage management, however, don't typically get as much attention in budget planning because they're already getting done, albeit manually, Park says. Southern developed some in-house storage-reporting tools, including those for inventory management and file-system management. The company also runs Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Manager for tracking and managing storage resources for its Windows servers.
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