Thursday, May 8, 2014

Have your back up & restore processes and technologies kept pace with the demands of your business?

By: Paul Oh   Categories:Storage and Data Management, Data Protection


Data is being created today at an exponential rate and the more data an organization creates, the greater the challenge to manage it. This is an unavoidable fact of business today in a digital world and one that all organizations need to address with a modern data protection and management strategy.

Backup and recovery is a critical component of enterprise data management. However, many IT Leaders are finding that the current processes and technologies in place have not kept pace with the demands of the business, and furthermore, the increased demands by the business around data access. The good news is that information management vendors have evolved their technologies to stay in line with the expectations and needs of today's businesses.


Data growth, budget pressure, rising service-level requirements, and new technologies like virtualization strain the capabilities of traditional backup and recovery processes... 


But recent product advances can provide an optimized strategy that:

• Tremendously reduces backup and recovery times
• Works smoothly across the virtual/physical boundary
• Introduces policy-based management to data retention
• Minimizes disruption from legal and regulatory discovery

The continuous growth of information means data protection is not only more important than ever before, it is also more expensive, time consuming and complex.

A variety of approaches are helping to simplify the data-protection process, keep costs in check, and improve recovery speed and confidence. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind when planning an overhaul or upgrading your existing architecture.

Data protection and management strategy
Both backups and archives are precautions an organization takes to protect itself “just in case”—but the cases are distinct and different administrators may be responsible for each. Backups are meant to recover information and processes in current use in case they are interrupted, corrupted, or lost.

Archiving provides enormous efficiencies in storage capacity, core network bandwidth, backup/recovery time, user service levels, and more—especially when it’s used together with a modern backup solution.

On premise vs. cloud back up
The cloud is undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in the IT industry right now. But comparing the benefits of both is not as simple as one would expect. For on-premise, costs do not stop and start with how much new hardware/software is needed to put a solution into place. And for cloud, similarly, there is more than a recurring monthly service cost. There are pros and cons to each strategy and both offer tangible advantages but you need to assess each solution and find the best fit for your requirements.

Disk-to-disk vs. Disk-to-tape
When you compare disk and tape from a purely financial standpoint, tape tends to win for smaller IT shops where the performance requirements are lower. Disk-based solutions with dedupe are definitely better as the performance and capacity requirements increase. However, the results may also change based on the vendor you choose, as some vendors provide fairly inexpensive tape or disk libraries, while others require the a more elaborate solution with the associated costs. Some of the downside to tape backups is: manual errors in handling, such as dropped, lost or mislabelled tapes in addition to time and money to move tapes between locations.

Backing up virtual machines
Virtualization has had an enormous transformation impact on data centers by consolidating multiple virtual machines onto physical hosts, automating manual processes, improving hardware and facilities utilization, in addition to adding power and cooling efficiency. But virtualization involves tradeoffs that affect backup and recovery.

More backups - the ease of deploying virtual machines can create a “virtual server sprawl”, increasing the time, bandwidth, and storage required to back them all up. To make matters worse, many IT departments are backing up both the virtual machines and their physical hosts.

Resource competition - virtualization maximizes utilization of CPU and I/O resources on physical hardware, but backups also need those same resources. The end result is that a backup on one virtual machine slows down every virtual machine instance on that host.

Backup/recovery and archiving solutions meet different business requirements, using technologies that have kept pace with the scale and complexity of enterprise IT. But an efficient, comprehensive approach to managing and protecting information uses both types of solutions to maintain and even raise service levels in the face of growing data volume, budget pressure, legal and regulatory requirements, and technological complexity.

For a good read:
The business value of improved backup and recovery
IBM Software, Thought Leadership White Paper
Fail-proof data backup and recovery is more critical than ever before to an organization’s survival as few businesses can survive for any length of time without their IT function. If you would like to implement a modern data management strategy to meet your organization’s objectives, feel free to contact me at 1-866-610-8489 or drop me a line here.

Paul Oh, Vice President, Services
Sentia

Sarah Warsi
Sarah Warsi

Paul Oh

As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution.

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As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution. She holds a degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

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