HyperProtect: Enhancing the Performance of a Dynamic Backup System Using Intelligent Scheduling

The extraordinary increase in the scale of the backup system and the daily data generated by large enterprise companies are making it extremely challenging to perform data protection efficiently. Traditionally this challenge is left for the backup administrators who are tasked with ensuring the backup and recovery goals are met by designing elaborate static backup schedules. However, the inability of the static backup schedules to adapt alongside the dynamic backup environment results in backup systems that miss their goals. The inefficiency of static backup schedules makes designing an intelligent scheduling algorithm for dynamic backup systems significantly necessary and important. In our paper, we propose an intelligent backup scheduler, HyperProtect, to effectively and efficiently allocate the vast amount of backup contents generated by large scale backup systems to the storage units. To perform empirical comparison of various schedulers, we propose three metrics, storage throughput utilization, backup time consistency, and storage switching to evaluate the backup and restore performance. Based on the experimental results, our scheduler, HyperProtect, achieves more than 55% decrease on storage switching while maintaining good storage throughput utilization and backup time consistency within 1% and 10% of the existing backup scheduler, respectively.