The future of data protection: looking to the future. (Storage Networking).

Future approaches, paradigms and technologies promise to simplify data protection for the most common organizations: small businesses, and enterprise workgroups and small departments. Forecasted change introduces risk in IT planning, especially for smaller organizations where budgets are small and sensitive, and the business implications of IT capability can be large. This article is the fifth, and last, in a series of articles addressing creation and maintenance of simple, effective, data-protection service-level-agreements (SLAs). These articles show how formulation, use, and maintenance of SLAs reduce risk, improve operations, and encourage growth of the "common organizations." The series presents motivation and methodology for creating SLAs, planning techniques for creating an infrastructure to support the SLA, an approach for implementing support for the SLA, and techniques for measuring the effectiveness of the SLA in producing business results. This last article outlines forecasted trends, that may aff ect data protection, and how an SLA might address these risks of the future.

Forecasted data protection solutions for small organizations pose opportunities (upside risk) as well as threats (downside risk). They exploit technology strengths and weaknesses. New data-protection paradigms, for instance, include mixed-media solutions. These paradigms combine the data longevity of tape with the fast, random access of disks. Data is backed up first to disk, exposing a smaller backup window than backing up to tape. Since backup usually requires data quiescence, slowing-down business operations, the shorter backup window provides real business value. Once the data is backed up to disk, business operations can proceed at a normal pace and important data protection operations can take place. The backup can be quickly verified on disk, increasing the integrity of the backup, then, migrated to tape for longer-term archive.

Figure 1 shows the strengths and weaknesses of mainstream media types and how they might complement one another. Solutions based on these kinds of opportunities have provided value at the enterprise level for a number of years and have recently been migrated to the mid-tier level of customers. Future, inexpensive exploitation of media complements will allow common organizations' IT managers to increase backup and recovery performance and reliability. Service level agreements and recovery-process documents can take advantage of these opportunities by suggesting the changes that might occur with the introduction of new technologies, such as infrastructure modifications, data availability increases, and backup/recovery improvements.

Such explicit recognition of opportunities dictates specifications for vendors, who will provide these new solutions for common organizations. Cramer Rosenthal McGlynn, LLC, a small investment firm in Manhattan, N.Y., is driving such specifications to Quantum and VERITAS, allowing the combined use of Quantum SuperLoaders, Quantum Guardian 4400 NAS servers, and VERITAS Backup Exec to deliver a low-cost mixed-media data-protection solution (see Figure 2).

Future Data-Protection Technologies

Other data-protection technology opportunities on the horizon include journaling and snapshot technologies, as well as advanced diagnostics, policy-based management and self-healing capabilities. While journaling has been used in primary storage contexts for many years, backup/recovery providers are currently investigating methods for creating recoverable, journaled copies of application data. Journaling provides more frequent backup copies, reducing potential data loss upon recovery. The challenge in providing this functionality lies not in copying the data, but in identifying and reliably capturing recoverable application data sets. Similarly, snapshots of recoverable data sets generally require data quiescence, slowing down data access for the duration of the snapshot. As the recognition of recoverable data sets becomes more explicit, in-process copies will become possible, though that may be a number of years away for the low end.

Increased manageability solutions, such as advanced diagnostics, policy-based management and self-healing capabilities, provide great opportunity for service-level improvements in the future. Data protection solutions are becoming more and more standard at a foundation level, through efforts such as the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative. With base-level standardization, storage-management software can build diagnostic models that recognize and predict common failure conditions. This capability complements policy-based management features that allow automated or advised actions, based on conditions detected through advanced diagnostics. Together, these technologies will provide self-healing function, first at the enterprise level, then migrating to the common organization as cost and scale can be reduced.

While SLAs should include plans to drive future opportunities, they should also guard against future technology threats. Those threats include obsolescence, compatibilities, manageability, legalities, and new responsibilities. Evolution of business drives technological change. Supporting this change involves decisions about the inevitable legacies. For instance, though tape media reliably holds data for 15 years or more, the ability to write and read the media depends on the availability of capable tape drives. As product lifetimes decrease due to the increasing frequency of new feature demands, this read/write support becomes more challenging for tape drive providers and customers alike. Current technologies under consideration to increase support for the long-term read/write capability involve backward read/write capability, and possibly in the future, generic, bit-by-bit tape read/write heads, with external tape format translations. Similarly, software compatibility with older tape formats, and manageabili ty of older media types can be addressed through more generic foundation designs, and modular software support for advanced media features.

An important new trend in IT responsibilities involves new legalities. The crackdown on misleading executive and accounting disclosures perpetuated data-handling ramifications. These ramifications range from the support of new accounting rules to increased corporate disclosures and record keeping, all demanding longer, more secure data retention, and strict, provable, enforceable policies regarding data deletion. Furthermore, the current realization that software companies can and should be held liable for bugs puts an additional burden on IT managers to perform due diligence on solutions, constantly monitoring for violations against corporate business goals. An SLA that guards common organizations against future business threats addresses these upcoming business problems through flexibility and explicit provisions to track these trends.

The Most Important Consideration

SLAs must address corporate direction as the most important future consideration. Increas-ingly, companies are realizing their core competencies through IT strategies. Future paradigms for common organizations include increased competition, faster business cycles, more efficient information exchange requirements, and the "virtualization" of business. Increased competition not only encourages faster re-sponse times and data growth, but also shifts emphasis in protecting data from theft. Theft-protection concerns increase as networked solutions become more prevalent. Data-protection SLAs must look forward to increasing security measures and appropriate data-deletion practices.

Faster business cycles require optimizing information exchange efficiency. As the competitive landscape accommodates these efficiency requirements, markets will become more efficient and competitive positioning and response more challenging. In an environment of accelerating business cycles, IT strategies play a key role in survival of common organizations. As fast as business cycles are contracting, geographic scope is expanding. SLAs can address requirements of this expansion by treating the IT infrastructure as a virtual company, expandable to any location transparently, once costs are in line with return for such endeavors. Flexibly configurable products such as Quantum's ATL M-series tape libraries, allow combinations of ATL M1500s and ATL M2500s to meet specific application and business level data protection needs in the data center and in remote locations.

Recent market volatility awakens the focus for data protection SLAs to accommodate a changing work force, with higher risk of conflicting data needs. Ultimately, data serves the people who carry out the business. SLAs of the future must accommodate changing workloads and investment priorities, combined with a wide range of training, skill, and motivation levels, and universally high expectations. The data-protection SLAs that focus on the corporate mission and communication between stakeholders will be the most likely to succeed. Over time, successful SLAs must become an integrated part of the. business, driving customers to work with their data-protection products and services vendors to create flexible, applications-oriented, solutions.

Figure 1

Data Protection Media Comparison

Value                      Disk                 Optical

Longevity                ~1 year               99 Years
                    Quick, Short-term     Fairly quick, very
                         backups           long-term backup

Density                   ~150G                  ~10G
                    Scales reasonably      Media management
                    to today's average     challenges; disk
                      data set size     change performance hit

Cost                       $1/M                  $7/M

Transportability         Fragile           Robust/Cumbersome

Performance            Fast random;         OK random; Slow
                       OK streaming     streaming (media change
                                        required for data>10G)

Interchangeability      Driver and           Many formats
                    interface support

Value                        Tape

Longevity                  15 years
                      Streamed long-term
                            backups

Density                    100-200G
                      Matches today's and
                       near term future
                     average data set size

Cost                       50cents/M

Transportability             Good

Performance              Slow random;
                        Fast streaming


Interchangeability  BRW common; Opportunity
                         for libraries

Lynne VanArsdale is senior strategic marketing manager for Quantum (Irvine, Calif.) and a member of SNIA board of directors (Mountain View, Calif.)

www.quantum.com

www.snia.org