Bernard Shen This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Storage Networking World Online - What's New? - Incremental backup

   www.snwonline.com/whats_new/in - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/8/2005   Last Visited: 5/8/2005

   (COMPUTERWORLD) Bernard Shen, a technology consultant at aerospace company BAE Systems North America, went from shipping 1,200 data archive tapes to an off-site storage facility every 90 days to sending just 200 over the same time period. He did it by storing only incremental changes to his company's data.
   ...
   Shen says the business case for incremental data backup was a no-brainer, but selling the idea to his IT team wasn't easy. "There is a tremendous amount of skepticism around it," he says.
   
   While Rockville, Md.-based BAE saves incremental changes across its 25 terabyte SAN, those data slices can be combined with previous full-server backups to create what's known as a synthetic backup, from which a systems administrator can then restore a file or application if it becomes corrupted or data is lost.
   
   Although Shen has eliminated full backups on his file servers with synthetic backups, he still performs them on his database servers because the technology he uses doesn't support block-level changes.
   ...
   Shen, whose company has 25,000 employees in 30 states, currently performs one incremental backup a day across 33 application servers using an appliance from StorServer, Inc. in Colorado Springs. By midyear, he hopes to have 100 out of 170 servers running on it. "The beauty of this technology is that you're doing disk-to-disk backup, and then in the morning, the backup goes from disk to tape," Shen says.
   ...
   Shen says that while the day-to-day technical management of an incremental environment is more complicated to use, it's well worth the added education required for his staff. "The software is a little more sophisticated, and it has more bells and whistles," he says.
   
   Shen says his StorServer installation cost $10,000 and was installed in two days, and the first 15 servers were backing up to it on the third day.
   
   The big return on investment came with having to spend only about $150,000 on back-end storage, as opposed to the $450,000 Shen would have spent if he were to size his environment for full backups.
   
   "That's because your system does not have to be sized to capture the larger volumes of data," he says.

2. 2. www.apqc.org

   www.apqc.org/portal/apqc/ksn?p - [Cached]

   Published on: 11/7/2004   Last Visited: 12/14/2005

   Bernard Shen, a technology consultant at BAE Systems North America, Inc. went from shipping 1200 data archive tapes every 90 days to an offsite storage facility to sending just 200 over the same time period. He did it by storing only incremental changes to his company's back-ups. Shen says the b....

3. 3. Incremental Improvement - Computerworld

   www.computerworld.com/hardware - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/3/2005   Last Visited: 5/3/2005

   02, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Bernard Shen, a technology consultant at aerospace company BAE Systems North America Inc., went from shipping 1,200 data archive tapes to an off-site storage facility every 90 days to sending just 200 over the same time period. He did it by storing only incremental changes to his company's data.
   
   Shen says the business case for incremental data backup was a no-brainer, but selling the idea to his IT team wasn't easy. "There is a tremendous amount of skepticism around it," he says.
   
   While Rockville, Md.-based BAE saves incremental changes across its 25TB storage-area network (SAN), those data slices can be combined with previous full-server backups to create what's known as a synthetic backup, from which a systems administrator can then restore a file or application if it becomes corrupted or data is lost.
   
   Although Shen has eliminated full backups on his file servers with synthetic backups, he still performs them on his database servers because the technology he uses doesn't support block-level changes.