The need for more inclusive backups and shorter recovery windows is driving companies to modernize their backup infrastructure
While technologies exist to vastly improve backup and recovery processes, many enterprises have delayed modernizing their backup infrastructure. Now a confluence of factors – greater storage demands, the need for faster disaster recovery, and the availability of cloud-based backup services – is spurring action.
Tape backup is dead. Long live tape backup.
The bane of many an IT pro’s existence, tape backups have been around for decades, frustrating the folks who have to rotate the tapes, troubleshoot backup failures, ship the tapes to offsite locations, track down lost tapes, and deal with the aftermath of unreadable tapes.
While technologies exist to vastly improve backup and recovery processes, many companies have delayed modernizing their backup infrastructure. Now a confluence of factors – greater storage demands, the need for faster data recovery, and the availability of cloud-based backup services – is spurring action.
“Backup is really the insurance policy that you hope you never have to cash. As such, it’s easy to skimp a little bit on that insurance policy,” says Dave Russell, research vice president at Gartner.
Companies have been skimping for many years, and backup systems haven’t kept pace with the rest of the IT environment. But the disparity is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly as the gap between business users’ expectations of data recovery and the reality of recoverability widens. “The business believes that it’s far more recoverable than it really is,” Russell says.
One challenge is how to protect virtualized environments, which pose technical and performance difficulties for traditional backup systems. Another issue is how to protect and recover data created at the edge. More business critical-information is contained on laptops and tablets – which may not be backed up. If they are backed up, it might take 24 hours or more to get back the data, which may be more than a few days old depending on the frequency of device backups.
Disk or tape? How about both
The business isn’t fully aware, and IT isn’t entirely forthcoming, about all of the challenges. But that’s changing.
“Increasingly, there’s an understanding and an appreciation that we have to protect more of our assets – such as branch offices, remotes, desktops, laptops, even test and development data — and that we have to be able to bring it back in a shorter amount of time,” Russell says.
A virtual world
IT initiatives such as server virtualization and data center consolidation are highlighting the need to modernize backup and recovery systems. Virtualization, in particular, has disrupted traditional backup processes and forced companies to reconsider their approach.
One issue has to do with resource consumption and efficiency. “Taking a full backup copy of your data is incredibly resource intensive. It takes a fair amount of CPU, a fair amount of memory, and most importantly, a huge amount of I/O,” Russell notes. “If you were to kick-off full backup simultaneously for six to eight virtual machines on a physical server, it would saturate all the available resources of that physical server.”
Another issue is recoverability in a virtualized environment. In some cases a company might want to bring back a full virtual machine. But in a lot of cases, the “disaster” is localized, such as the loss of a file or a corrupt application, and a company may only want to restore that one file, for instance. That kind of granularity has been lacking. “Traditional backup has had a hard time peeking into the virtual machines just to get the data that’s required,” Russell says.
Backup vendors have been addressing those issues and outfitting their software with new capabilities geared for virtualized environments. Increasingly, those new capabilities are being baked into disk-based data capture and data recovery products. As enterprises look to update their backup software, many are simultaneously moving away from tape-based solutions to disk-based backup. (Read about one law firm’s move to disk and its DR trial by fire… literally)
The current generation of enterprise disk-based backup and recovery tools tout features such as data deduplication, snapshots, heterogeneous replication, and real-time backups. There’s a wide range of vendors in the market, including storage stalwarts EMC, IBM, Symantec and NetApp as well as smaller specialists such as CommVault, FalconStor Software, Asigra, i365, and BakBone Software (which Quest Software is acquiring).
Real-time backup, or continuous data protection (CDP), captures every change made in a file, keeping a record of the changes and enabling companies to initiate a recovery from whichever point they wish.
Engineering firm Strand Associates is using CDP technology from FalconStor to protect data across its 11 U.S. offices and significantly speed data recovery operations. The ability to recover data from disk in just minutes has changed the way the firm operates – not only the IT team, which no longer spends hours struggling with tape and backup administration, but also the end users, who work on enormous engineering files and can revert to old versions easily rather than duplicating work.
Because it’s so easy to recover data from disk, the IT team at Strand does hundreds of restore jobs each year, says Justin Bell, network engineer at the Madison, Wis., firm. “We view it as a service that we can provide to our users,” says Bell, who estimates the recovery time for most files is about 3 to 5 minutes. “If something happens to a file, or you’re designing a roadway and you put some wrong numbers in and you’re an hour into it, don’t spend a lot of time redoing it. Just call us, and we’ll get your file back.”
Another disk-based backup technology that’s getting enterprise attention is the use of storage array snapshots as part of an enterprise backup and recovery scheme. CommVault, for instance, can integrate with storage platforms from vendors such as NetApp, EMC and Dell to schedule and manage array-based snapshots.
“We can automatically connect to those storage arrays, and we can start to manage multiple vendors’ snapshots for backup and recovery,” says Dave West, vice president of marketing at CommVault. In addition to managing multiple vendors’ snapshots under a single framework, CommVault can copy the snapshots to tape, for instance, for long-term retention purposes.
Tape hangs around
While disk-based backup is on the rise, tape isn’t going away anytime soon.
Six years ago, enterprises backed up directly to tape 63% of the time, Gartner’s Russell says. Today, enterprises back up directly to tape — without any disk – just 13% of the time. But that’s not the whole story. Another 65% of enterprises have adopted a disk-to-disk-to-tape approach, whereby they back up to disk first and then write to tape. “That means 78% of the enterprise market has at least a little bit of tape somewhere in their backup process,” Russell says.
Even vendors on the cutting edge of disk-based backup acknowledge there’s a place for tape.
“Tape has a role in the management and retention of data. Tape is a very economical, long term medium,” CommVault’s West says. “When you have requirements to store data indefinitely, you can stick it on tapes and store them in a mine somewhere. It’s a very efficient way of storing the data.”
It all comes down to tiers.
Today’s enterprises can provide more levels of recovery than in the past via a multi-tiered backup and recovery approach. For the most critical systems, a large enterprise might opt to replicate data through high speed fiber-optic lines to a backup data center, for instance. For less critical resources, a company might opt to backup to disk and replicate that disk over the WAN, recognizing that recovery might take a little more time, or the backup systems might run on slightly slower hardware. For long-term archiving – often for regulatory requirements – companies may keep using tapes, shipped offsite for storage.
Increasingly, one of those tiers might be the cloud.
“In addition to sending physical tapes off to some locked-up facility, you might also want to be able to electronically vault your data to some other location for disaster recovery purposes or just to have another copy for long-term retention of your data,” Russell says of cloud-based backup options.
Interest in cloud-based backup is growing. For some companies, cloud-based backup offers an opportunity to outsource something they don’t want to keep doing in-house. For others, the cloud represents just one more backup tier to be exploited. For midsize enterprises that don’t have the resources to build out their own recovery infrastructures, cloud services can offer a means of more immediate recoverability that tape could provide. By 2014, 30% of midsize enterprises will adopt cloud services to support IT operations recovery, Gartner predicts.
While not every organization is prepared to relinquish backup to an external provider, the trend toward a multi-tiered backup infrastructure is going strong. More than 50% of midsize organizations and more than 75% of large enterprises will implement tiered recovery architectures by 2013, Gartner predicts.
The expanding range of backup choices gives enterprises of all sizes a lot more options for improving broken backup systems, Russell says. “You can think of it as a rich palette of colors whereas before we were in a monochrome world.”
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