DP+IP = design of efficient backup scheduling

Many industries experience an explosion in digital content. This explosion of electronic documents, along with new regulations and document retention rules, sets new requirements for performance efficiency of traditional data protection and archival tools. During a backup session a predefined set of objects (client filesystems) should be backed up. Traditionally, no information on the expected duration and throughput requirements of different backup jobs is provided. This may lead to a suboptimal job schedule that results in the increased backup session time. In this work, we characterize each backup job via two metrics, called job duration and job throughput. These metrics are derived from collected historic information about backup jobs during previous backup sessions. Our goal is to automate the design of a backup schedule that minimizes the overall completion time for a given set of backup jobs. This problem can be formulated as a resource constrained scheduling problem where a set of n jobs should be scheduled on m machines with given capacities. We provide an integer programming (IP) formulation of this problem and use available IP-solvers for finding an optimized schedule, called binpacking schedule. Performance benefits of the new bin-packing schedule are evaluated via a broad variety of realistic experiments using backup processing data from six backup servers in HP Labs. The new bin-packing job schedule significantly optimizes the backup session time (20%-60% of backup time reduction). HP Data Protector (DP) is HP's enterprise backup offering and it can directly benefit from the designed technique. Moreover, significantly reduced backup session times guarantee an improved resource/power usage of the overall backup solution.