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Back up and data recovery
Enterprises could be doing better when it comes to back up and data recovery, says Tony Lock, Freeform Dynamics –
www.freeformdynamics.com.
What could be new about backup and recovery? After all, everyone has been doing this in some form or another every since computing began. But then again, even though this is a process which every organisation has to do, few think they do it well. Even fewer are in a position to know they are capable of recovering data when they need to, quickly enough to meet the requirements of the business processes they support.
Beyond this the number of organisations that test their backups and, much more importantly, their ability to recover data is small enough to trouble hardly any judges.
This state of affairs begs the question can new solutions make like for better data protection, or should everyone focus on getting their data support processes functioning more efficiently? If new technological solutions are to play a part, what solutions are out there and where do they fit into the grand scheme of things?
In the vast majority of enterprises, until very recently “data protection” has usually equated to taking backups of data and storing them on tape. Sounds simple, but the devil is very much in the detail. As data volumes have grown rapidly many organisations find that they no longer have the time to stop all applications and take a copy of core data to tape. In effect the so-called “backup window” has all but evaporated.
Modern backup software solutions can alleviate this by not requiring that all applications be closed down before the backup is taken but the task of ensuring that data backups can be recovered to a consistent, and accurate, state is non-trivial for many applications.
As a consequence of the capital cost of disk falling per terabyte of capacity, many organisations have started
backing up directly to disk as a first stage as in many scenarios this is far quicker than backing up to tape.
Even where disk to disk backup takes place the majority of organisations often then take a copy of the saved data from the second disk to tape without having to worry about the speed of the process as the user is able to access the original data platforms as soon as the first copy is taken. Such tapes are easy to transport off site, a major consideration for small organisations that may not have access to another office location to hold a second copy of data remote from the primary site.
There are many ways for disk to disk copies to be effected, from pure software and appliance solutions through to functionality resident in the data storage platforms themselves. A glance at the figure below illustrates that the use of such replication, snap-shot and point in time copy capabilities has grown progressively over the course of recent years, although mainly for data held on central platforms and servers.
Given that data volumes being held by organisations are growing rapidly, both as a consequence of legislative and regulatory factors as well as applications and users making greater use of video, voice and image solutions, it is clear that holding all data on front line storage platforms is becoming extremely expensive.
At the same time the awareness of the cost of storing data for progressively longer periods of time makes it likely that interest in sophisticated data protection solutions and management solutions will grow.
One area likely to attract investment include “data deduplication” solutions that ensure that only a single copy of data is maintained on disk rather than the usual
“In the vast majority of enterprises, until very recently “data protection” has usually equated to taking backups of data and storing them on tape. Sounds simple, but the devil is very much in the detail. As data volumes have grown rapidly many organisations find that they no longer have the time to stop all applications and take a copy of core data to tape.”
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