How disk-to-disk backup saves time and money.

Information technology administrators in small and medium-sized businesses face unrelenting data growth, they work to ensure the availability of important applications such as accounting, document management and email. IT staff must also deal with shrinking windows of time to backup data, and recover quickly from a simple drive failure or a more catastrophic data loss.

Today's IT staffs also now have the added responsibility of adhering to more recent legislation governing the storage and access of electronic records. Laws like Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) and more recently, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are direct results of ensuring the integrity and privacy of electronic records. The GLBA mandates privacy requirements for companies that provide services to the financial services industry. Sarbanes-Oxley, enacted in July 2002 and enforced by the federal Securities and Exchange commission (SEC), creates more corporate oversight and protects shareholders from future Enron and WorldCom-like problems. Among its mandates, Sarbanes specifies how long certain records must be retained and sets penalties for destroying records (physical or electronic).

Heightened awareness around business continuity and regulatory compliance has caused IT administrators to invest in a new or improved data protection and recovery process. Industry analysts, while acknowledging parallels to the Y2K phenomenon, believe that compliance will instead affect businesses of all sizes that collectively need to implement data protection policies that adhere to oncoming regulations or face substantial penalties.

"A key to understanding the impact compliance will have is seeing that it affects all industries [and] affects organizations large and small (the biggest hospitals and the smallest doctors' offices must comply with HIPAA)," said Peter Gerr, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group, in a recent interview with SearchStorage.com. "Compliance regulations already cross the boundaries between our corporate, government and personal lives. Wherever there is information, there will be a compliance regulation close behind to protect the security of or avoid the misuse of those valuable assets."

While meeting compliance or headline-grabbing disasters tend to be credited for increased spending in business continuity, the truth remains that IT staffs must mitigate these difficult, everyday issues if they are going to maintain optimum business continuity.

These issues include:

1. Shrinking backup windows--This is caused by the proliferation of data-intensive, high-availability applications such as Web-based services (email, order processing) and other applications now being required to be available around-the-clock.

2. Fast-growing data volumes--The amount of data being created and stored continues to be staggering. It is reality, not a trend. If the amount of data wasn't growing so quickly, backup windows would not be an issue. These Web-based applications are generally the likely culprits.

3. Lack of central control over distributed systems--IT staff managing backup processes for offsite offices frequently must trust often untrained co-workers to conduct backup activities such as swapping out and replacing tape media. This lack of control and having redundant hardware and software components in multiple offices as opposed to a centralized backup process is cost-prohibitive. Being unable to adequately monitor remote processes also makes it difficult to set up data protection processes required when implementing a business continuity plan.

4. Increasing rate of recovery failure--Every day in every organization, business continuity is jeopardized by viruses, accidental data deletion, and data corruption (hardware or software). Systems grow more complex, increasing the likelihood of failure. Many users and system administrators have not implemented proper backup procedures, and as a result, spend too much time either restoring data or recreating data from scratch.

5. IT department turnover and cost reductions--IT departments are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and achieve more results with static resources. They are also experiencing a higher-than-average rate of turnover compared to other corporate disciplines. This combination of factors creates a difficult situation for IT management, forcing them to seek assistance from tools, utilities or third party services.

6. Human error--At the end of the day, IT staffs need to mitigate human error, the most common cause of data loss within an organization. Whether it's accidentally deleting ah email or file or overfilling a disk drive that caused a server crash, these are daily occurrences, and data protection methods and schemes must take this into account.

As companies consider the data protection portion of its business continuity program, IT staff and their managers with budgetary authority must streamline processes that contribute to human error and challenges just laid forth.

Data stages emerge

Compliance has also brought to light the difference between the backup and archive of data, and the varying characteristics that these data stages typify. Simply put, backup ensures a readily available data copy is available for rapid restore, if necessary. Archive is a long-term retention of data placed on less expensive media. Typically, the information is stored offsite and is held for years if mandated to do so by regulations. If regulations apply, older data is deleted based on company policy and the media is rotated for re-use.

When data access demands were not as high, backup and archive previously were one in the same. However, today data maintains different characteristics as it ages. For example, its corporate importance may be just as high once it ages a year or two, but access requirements may not be quite as high in terms of recall. Subsequently, companies need to evaluate and match the data protection technologies that best suit the needs of the company to access the data.

Traditional data protection suited for today's archive

After 50 years, tape-based storage remains the traditional and most often used method to backup digital information. Diverse organizations use tape as a stable means to ensure they have complete and portable copies of their data. Tape drives, much like magnetic hard drives, have continued to make consistent advancements in access speeds, capacity and smaller footprints.

Tape plays a role important role at the end of a data lifecycle in storing information not requiring frequent access. It would not cause significant problems to the organization if it took several hours or days to restore this type of data. Tape is optimally utilized as a cost-effective way to archive data that still needs to be retained for corporate or regulatory purposes. IT staff can also leverage its portability advantages where they can store archives at a secure, off-site facility.

Disk-to-disk backup approaches

Industry analysts have longed predicted the fall of disk prices as an economic driver to move away from traditional, tape-based backup. However, a more wide-scale convergence of regulatory and economic drivers and technical innovations have made companies consider implementing disk-based, online data protection and recovery solutions.

While traditional backup's merits are rooted in low costs and portability, its downsides do not play well for companies looking to streamline process and deliver must faster recovery of information.

* Backup Speed--Because tape uses a linear recording format it takes more time to write backup data vs. disk. Traditional tape backup strategies including full, incremental and differential methods that require significant bandwidth to meet short backup windows.

* Ability to audit backup--With distributed systems, it is difficult to verify that tapes are properly written to each daily backup.

* Manual intervention for safety-Without manual intervention, backup tapes remain in the tape drive, leaving the data vulnerable to physical events.

* Verification of backup data--Most people do not turn on the option to "verify after write" on their tape drives because this adds 30-50 percent to the time required to complete the backup process.

* 24x7 access to data for recovery--If tapes are removed from the drives to be sent offsite (the recommended method), there is a significant delay in those tapes returning for recovery purposes.

For these reasons, disk-based backup is designed specifically for those companies who require immediate recovery of lost or deleted information yet don't have a lot of time to deal with the processes associated with tape. Beyond its perceived higher cost, disk-based backup has its own barriers to gaining acceptance, however some technology developments have brought viability to the medium as a primary method to protecting data that needs more immediate recovery before migrating to tape-based technology in due time.

Backup Appliances

In the past 12-18 months, storage vendors have introduced backup appliances to the marketplace. These appliances are specifically offer a near-line storage option for companies that have more immediate recovery requirements and may already have a tape-based storage system in place. Backup appliances leverage disk-based backup and recovery speeds and in some cases utilize content-addressed storage (CAS), which instead of employing a centralized index or database to find files, CAS software identifies each file with a content address to directly locate the file.

Backup appliances provide disk drive speed and faster, random-access capability; however, many of the devices the device with the inherent limitations of tape backup such as having to conduct full and incremental cycles every week. Ultimately, this can result in more data to manage and then migrate.

From a technology perspective, backup appliances have certainly taken an admirable step toward differentiating the differences between backup and archive. They can provide more immediate recovery than tape, yet provide a smooth transition to tape once the data ages and is not accessed as often.

Software-Centric Disk-to-Disk

Utilizing tape devices of backup appliances requires a mandatory hardware investment to ensure effective data lifecycle management. However, well-established software architectures are available to the businesses that can offer up disk's inherent benefits but still leverage a user's existing infrastructure. Disk-based data protection and recovery software refers to the movement of electronic data over private or public communication lines from a local (primary) storage device to a remote (secondary) storage device for the purpose of being able to restore the data in the event the primary copy is lost. Disk-based backup software is provisioned in two ways:

* As an online data protection and recovery service offered by an outsourced provider; or

* Sold as a suite of products enabling a customer to manage their own internal data protection and recovery process.

Utilizing software that facilitates disk-to-disk data protection and recovery continues to build momentum as technologies mature and business conditions of the enterprise permeate into the SMB space. Managing growing data volumes across distributed sites have made IT staff more closely consider the economic viability of leveraging hard drives for the following reasons:

Streamlined Process--Limited IT resources mean SMBs do not want to manage a cumbersome data backup and migration process with multiple vendors. Automated, online data protection and recovery software enables IT administrators to set up policies that eliminate manual processes associated with tape-based backup such as swapping tapes for backups and having to retrieve them in a restore situation. Innovative back-end architectures built into online backup solutions today allow data from servers running multiple OS to backup to and restore from a system-independent platform that can operate on a commodity RAID device.

Efficient--Online data protection and recovery software can efficiently backup and restore data without simply mirroring the data from one device to another. Innovative delta-block, adaptive differencing and other related scanning techniques enable only changed blocks of data to be backed up, encrypted and moved to hard disk for protection.

Specialized, delta-processing techniques result in minimal data travelling across the network to effectively recreate a full backup of the protected data. The best can recreate a full backup by transmitting as little as one to two percent of the total uncompressed data across the communication line each night. For example, if the client's server has 100GB of storage designated for backup each night, then the amount of data transferred is typically 2GB or less. If that data were transmitted over a network with available bandwidth of 1.5MB/sec (offered by a TI or DSL type connection) then the backup window would be less than two hours on a typical night. Using these techniques puts less data on the backup devices, which also enable more retentions of the individual backup in a smaller storage footprint.

Cost-Effective--The efficiency of having physically less data backed up to a device equates to having to buy capacity less frequently. By leveraging private or public communication lines, each remote site or office for an SMB does not have to buy their own backup device and the backup data can be centrally managed. This advantage also holds true for SMBs considering backup appliances; however, this may require a mandatory hardware investment. IT staff, by deploying an online data protection and recovery solution instead of tape for its primary backup, will also see considerable cost savings by not spending as much time on backup administration, offsite storage, emergency retrieval costs and tape inventory.

Resource Centralization--By leveraging the Internet, online, disk-to-disk backup affords companies the luxury of automating and centralizing their backup tasks. Instead of assigning a tape drive of more to each remotely installed server, software agents can be installed on these devices and the backed up data can be sent to a central storage device. This technique alleviates reliance on remote staff and removes the possibility of human error being the cause for information not being protected properly.

The dollars and sense of disk-based data protection Whether a company is considering a disk-to-disk backup software solution, an IT manager must look at the costs of to make the business case. The costs incurred by companies for the backup task will vary depending on an organization's unique environment.

Depending on the soft cost savings that a company can attribute to an online backup solution, it is typical for a company to save significant dollars using online data protection while improving the level of service for the data protection function. By referring to the detailed assumptions below for the business case, one can generate their own customized business case by substituting numbers based on local factors.

If a company is using traditional backup methods, before evaluating any disk-to-disk solution, they should determine the costs and evaluate the efficiency of the following hard and soft costs:

Hard Costs

* Off-site administration

* Tape handling and labelling

* Backup monitoring and troubleshooting 

* Off-site costs of tapes and storage charges

* Additional emergency recall service charges

* Software license and maintenance costs area constant per year for tape backup software.

* Maintenance of tape drives are continually being improved so people want the latest technology for speed and reliability.

Soft Cost

* Cost of remote staff conducting/managing backup tasks

Disk-based backup technologies historically have been designed so that companies do not have to have as much manual intervention and have to pay for services such as tape handling and restoration. With manpower costs often exceeding those of equipment, organizations need to consider technologies that streamline backup processes that cost-effectively manage capital expenditures.

Conclusion

The IT staff, or in many cases, the IT person faces many daunting issues as they struggle to ensure its company's data is reliably managed, backed up and retrievable. Whether it's dealing with compliance mandates or inefficient backup processes, companies of all sizes need to take a personal inventory of data backup issues being experienced and evaluate new approaches.

Disk-to-disk backup has arrived as cost-effective option that can replace or complement traditional backup methods. Its ability to centralize and manage backup processes bring significant cost-saving opportunities by reducing redundant equipment procurement and lowering manpower costs.

79% Of Businesses Say: Too Difficult To Carry Out Data Migration Projects Because Of I.T.

Kognito have made public the results of a poll carried out among the financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution and utilities by market research agency Vanson Bourne. The survey asked 100 UK IT decision-makers in the UK whether they felt it was difficult to stop IT operations which are in constant use to perform a data migration. On average, a resounding 72% of respondents claimed this to be the case. By looking at the poll findings more in detail it is interesting--and yet not surprising--to notice that the majorities in all industries ticked the 'yes' box.

However one figure stands out: only 58% of financial services respondents said they find it difficult to stop their IT systems to migrate data. This could be because such organisations tend to have highly-redundant systems and hence can fairly easily take one system down to carry out the data migration, while the other continues to serve the organisation. Alternatively, this could be explained by the fact that businesses in the financial services understand the importance of rationalising their computing environment and ale prepared to balance the benefits of undertaking a data migration or platform rationalisation project against any potential disruption to their business by halting their IT operations.

On the other hand, in the retail, distribution and transport sectors this figure rose to 79%; this is likely to be the result of the nature of these businesses, which often operate online shopping facilities and web-based tracking systems, both applications that need to be running 24/7 in most cases.

In 76% of the cases for respondents from the manufacturing industry, halting the IT operations was a challenge. Again this can be explained by the fact that nowadays such organisations tend to be heavily automated and hence operational around the clock and highly dependent on their systems and networks. Looking at how a company's size affects its capacity to halt its IT infrastructure, there is a slight difference between organisations employing between 1,000 and 3,000 people and those with a staff of over 3,000.

In the first instance the answer was yes in 74% of the cases whereas in the larger companies this percentage dropped to 71%. Therefore, company size makes no difference; the majority of companies still need to stop their IT systems to perform data migration or platform rationalisation projects. Therefore, it would seem that companies are put off from performing these tasks because of the inconvenience caused to the business.

Asked why the majority of organisations find it difficult to stop their IT systems even when a data migration project could bring substantial benefits to the business, Kognitio believes it is mostly about profits and the perceived inconvenience of data migration projects: "Taking the IT systems down usually means halting production, be it of a tangible product or a service, and equates to an immediate loss of revenue. Ironically, completing a successful data migration or platform rationalisation project leads to a much more streamlined IT environment which is easier to manage and which affords the organisation greater business agility and the power to increase profits.

Because of today's heavy reliance on the IT infrastructure, it is difficult for most businesses to migrate data without affecting the IT department as ah internal resource because this is usually needed when companies plan to carry out data migration projects in-house". www.kognito.com

Ray Ganong is chief technology officer at EVault, Inc.