Backup & protection

A row in the register is the protection service: what is protected, under what policy, and when a restore was last tested. It is not the appliance.

A dedicated backup appliance, whose whole job is to receive copies, is a storage system whose role is Backup. It has capacity, controllers, a version and a support end date, and all of those are storage-system fields. A protection policy is not a field of an appliance, and it has no other home in the product — and it is exactly the half an external auditor asks about.

The columns

Column	What it says
Service name	The service's identity, and its record key
Product	Veeam · Commvault · Rubrik · Cohesity · NetBackup · TSM
Version	The product version
Kind	Software · Appliance · Managed service · SaaS — how the service is delivered
Status	The five status values shared across infrastructure
Site	Where the service sits
Protected servers · Protected systems	How many assets the service protects
Coverage	The coverage percentage, as a meter
Last success	When the last job finished successfully
Failures (24h)	How many jobs failed in the last day
Retention	How many days copies are kept
Utilization	A meter over used capacity and total capacity
Restore last tested	When a restore was actually tested
Owning team	Who is responsible for the service

The last four columns — Retention, Utilization, Restore last tested and Owning team — are not in the default set. They are added through the column picker, and they are always in the export.

The color thresholds are inverted, and that is a decision rather than a defect

Everywhere else in the product, a high utilization meter is bad: a storage system at 90% is a finding. In the coverage column it is the other way round — low coverage is the finding and high coverage is the desired state. The meter warns below 95% and turns red below 90%, the two figures a bank's disaster-recovery review asks about.

The Utilization column for the same service uses the ordinary thresholds. Two meters on one screen with two directions of meaning is exactly where the direction has to be said out loud.

Columns that age

Last success is not only a date: it warns after 24 hours and turns red after 72. Failures (24h) turns red on any number above zero — one failure is a failure.

On the connection map

The edge into a backup service is Backs up, and it is derived from the target itself: once the target is a backup service, the relationship needs no assertion. Between two servers — where one server backs up another — the relationship still has to be declared, because no inventory source can see it.