One would be hard pressed these days to find an IT executive who believes his or her backup process is healthy. In fact, most would probably say the opposite: that their backup processes are broken. Organizations know this and yet they feel unable to respond since budget freezes, staff reductions and new internal and external requirements make fixing the problem seem impossible. This perception, however, is false. IT can heal backup under current circumstances.
Five considerations for better backup
Fixing backup is not a simple matter, nor should it be presented as such. However, there are five considerations we can examine when discussing the opportunity to improve the backup situation plaguing data centers.
1. Determine the biggest pain points you need to solve.
Most IT organizations need some immediate relief from current backup pain, including day-to-day tactical problems such as failed backups and recoveries. They also need to meet heightened recovery expectations with fewer resources; that is, recover data when and where needed to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs). Additional goals will likely include gaining adaptability, flexibility and scalability, as well as the ability to respond to constantly changing demands without disruptive changes to the backup infrastructure. This might also be an opportune moment to make sure whatever changes you make will support the test and development environments that require multiple copies of production data. With shrinking application development windows, access to near-real time copies of production data for testing is important.
2. Move backup to disk.
Backup to tape for disaster recovery (DR) purposes is costly, time consuming and ineffective when time-to-recovery is the primary measure of effectiveness. The trap that organizations must be careful not to fall into is assuming that they can solve such a problem using outdated tape methodologies. Backup and recovery may be the immediate pain points that companies seek to address, but backup and recovery problems reflect the new challenges that organizations face when optimizing existing backup infrastructures for DR.
Disk is the lynchpin to redesigning a corporation’s backup infrastructure. It solves existing backup and recovery problems while giving organizations new ways to use the backup data that were not available when data was stored to tape. First, companies must look to implement a disk-based storage system as a backup target. This includes disk targets such as networked attached storage (NAS) or virtual tape libraries (VTLs), as well as other advanced forms of disk-based data protection such deduplication, WAN optimized replication and continuous data protection (CDP) using advanced snapshot technology.
Disk consistently increases backup and recovery success rates to 99 percent or more while reducing the time associated with managing the process, improving performance and reliability over tape. Technological introductions like deduplication, high capacity, low-cost SATA drives and WAN optimized replication further add to disk’s appeal by making it as affordable and as functional as tape.
3. Evaluate what VTLs can offer your backup redesign strategy.
Enterprise companies have a multitude of options available to them when it comes to redesigning their backup infrastructures. Choosing a disk-based storage system is the first step in the backup redesign, providing faster and more reliable backup and recovery than tape. However, expanding beyond the basic functionality of backup and recovery to receive the advanced data protection benefits of deduplication, optimized replication or continuous data protection brings with it a wide range of options. The difficulty arises in knowing which disk-based option is the best starting point for an organization.
Prioritizing VTL with deduplication over other disk-based deduplication approaches makes the most sense for organizations that possess high performance SAN-attached applications that use tape as their primary backup targets.
There are numerous advantages that a VTL yields in these situations. For example, only a VTL can emulate physical tape libraries and tape drives that the backup software and existing backup processes are already accustomed to seeing, whereas a NAS solution can only present a file share to the backup software. Since a VTL can emulate any number of tape and tape drives, a VTL interface can be presented and discovered by the backup software with minimal setup or changes to the existing backup software or backup process and without the need to purchase additional software licenses. For organizations with multiple SAN-based backup servers and many jobs, a VTL can offer a non-disruptive solution, significantly improving backup and recovery performance while minimizing IT investments and time-changing backup processes.
The backup software will still recognize the VTL as a physical tape drive, so if the backup software is doing backup multiplexing, it will continue to work. With a VTL, organizations can continue to leave their currently scheduled backup jobs with multiplexing in place once the VTL replaces the physical tape library. Those with FC SANs can also take advantage of an advanced backup software feature known as the “shared storage option.” Available from many enterprise backup software solutions, this option provides backup clients direct access to a tape drive. Using this feature, a backup client can send data directly to the backup target as opposed to the backup first sending the data to a media server. This option is only available with VTLs, not NAS.
VTLs can also provide direct copy to tape and tape management functionality, eliminating disruption of the backup production environment or network for creating physical tape. This is a particularly important feature if an organization wants to create physical tape simultaneous to writing capacity optimized (deduplicated) data to disk. This is also important for organizations that want to write to physical tape at their DR sites without having to install and license additional copies of each backup application at the DR location.
4. Work with the budget you have. IT budgets are for the most part staying flat or even declining. Meanwhile, data growth continues, so backup loads are only increasing. Individual business units want more data protection choices, not fewer. And IT is asked to do ever more, but without introducing new risks to the organization. Optimizing disk-based backup with data deduplication is the answer to many of these data protection problems because it increases backup speeds and success rates while keeping backup data stores under control.
5. Consider the realities of the landscape, and act. Year-over-year storage growth continues unabated. By the end of this decade, according to IDC, our digital universe will be 44 times larger than it is now, with approximately 35 zettabytes of virtual data needing management by 2020. With that expanded data store comes an increased need for reliable business continuity and DR. These are now requirements, not luxuries. Additionally, server virtualization is changing the landscape of corporate data centers and the needs for change to backup and recovery methodologies. Finally, pressures from regulatory corridors are forcing IT and legal to work together more closely to coordinate electronic discovery and more stringent service level agreements (SLAs).
Within the next couple of years, more than 30 percent of organizations will have replaced existing backup methodologies, according to recent research surveys. The companies undertaking those initiatives face the same set of circumstances as the rest of the market. They are just as affected by the persistent tough economic climate in which budget freezes and IT staffing cutbacks are now part of the corporate landscape. Nevertheless, these conditions are actually hastening – not slowing – the desire of companies to redesign their backup infrastructures. They recognize they can realize substantial returns on investment using new backup infrastructures through more efficient hardware, power savings and staff utilization. And when they take into account the core considerations regarding better backup, they find that fixing their processes is both necessary and possible.
A paper from FalconStor. Ideas for now.
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