New technologies tackle remote office backup
With the exponential growth of data over the last decade, today an average of two-thirds of data sits on laptops and servers located away from head office. But, as a legion of data protection failure news stories reveal, data protection strategies have not kept pace. Indeed, according to a recent Gartner Data Centre conference poll, upwards of seventy percent of IT professionals are dissatisfied with their current back-up solution for remote servers. Yet, recent disasters, such as the Northgate fire in the UK, as well as more everyday business concerns such as continuance, litigation readiness, regulatory compliance and privacy, are all compelling them to seriously re-think the quality of their remote office date protection strategy. Fortunately, unknown to most, developments in back up technologies are in fact stretching IT budgets further and make 2006 ‘the year to get serious about tackling remote office data protection’, according to storage experts the Teneja Group in their report: ‘Tackling The Challenges Of The Remote Office’. Data de-duplication Duplicate data explains why demand for storage is rising faster than the amount of data requiring protection. The Enterprise Storage Group (ESG) estimates that while companies are collecting 60 percent more data each year, total storage under management is expanding five to ten times. E-mail is one reason. End-user data audits show that a typical exchange will generate ten copies of the same file attachment. Another source of duplicate data is at the sub-file level. For example, successive drafts of a document in Microsoft Word may differ by only a few paragraphs. Nonetheless, users will generate a new file for each, resulting in the same data segment being stored multiple times. At best, standard backup solutions will compress the duplicate data; they won’t eliminate it. Solutions exploiting data de-duplication technology will. One example is Avamar’s Remote Office Solution. Here, software installs a lightweight agent on the laptops, servers and other remote client systems to be protected. The agent inspects the data on the client at the sub-file level and assigns a unique identifier to each data segment. By sending only the unique identifiers to the Axion server, this can quickly assess whether or not the segment has already been backed up. Network and storage capacity Throwing more bandwidth at the problem is simply too costly and time consuming for most companies. The same holds for continually adding storage capacity. By eliminating redundant data at its source, and before transmission from the remote office over the WAN, using data deduplication technology can result in up to 300x reduction in the bandwidth and storage required for full, daily backups. A similarly dramatic reduction can be achieved in the time it takes to perform a backup, a previous obstacle to disk-based data protection for many companies. Transferring terabytes of data across a WAN can take days. However, with de-duplication, terabytes become gigabytes, allowing the backup window to drop significantly. Here’s a real life example: a company’s backup of 2 terabytes of data spread across 12 remote offices took four hours using a tape-based system. It now takes just two-and-a-half minutes using a disk-based solution based on data de-duplication. Crucially, from a business continuity viewpoint, the success of the company’s backups are now guaranteed. Previously, tape backups had been left to untrained local staff who didn’t always understand why they were doing backups and what it meant. The result was a remote backup success rate little better than the industry average of 30 percent. The administration features available with the latest disk-based systems hand back control over remote office data backup to the head office. They can be automated to perform regular backups through a consolidated, web-based interface without any manual intervention. The savings of remote office IT time and expenses alone can repay the investment in these systems in under a year. Even more important in business continuity terms are the benefits of being able to recover data from disk – without having to rebuild it from full and incremental tape backups. Shipping physical tapes from remote offices across the country to storage facilities is becoming less and less feasible, either from a financial standpoint or in the event of an imminent disaster. So, typically, companies use remote mirroring to protect their most mission critical data. As well as being expensive, this workaround leaves the majority of data unprotected. By contrast, the combination of disk-based backup and data de-duplication means that a single, full copy of your company’s data is stored across the organisation. This can be replicated over a WAN, easily and inexpensively, to a secure data centre in a remote location. By the same token, data de-duplication makes disaster recovery across a WAN much easier. Disaster recovery testing Minor data loss Consider staff at a remote office accidentally deleting a key folder. This can leave them waiting for hours while IT staff locate the relevant backup tape, wait for it to arrive and, finally, search for the deleted files. Another compelling aspect of disk-based backup is that recovering files becomes as straightforward as a Google search – literally. This turns your backup and recovery solution into a scalable, digital archive. In this way, archive and other features can add significantly to the ROI from your backup solution, but what should you consider when choosing a solution? As a minimum, ensure that any solution you are seriously considering: * Is based on a system architecture that will scale for performance, capacity and reliability as your remote office data needs grow; The final point is important in light of the overwhelming evidence that many companies still want to use tape for off-site long term archival due to its portability, low cost and longevity. In any event, the issue facing companies is not so much tape or disk, but whether traditional solutions of all kinds are sustainable against a backdrop of rising data volumes and a growing risk of major disasters. Recent developments in backup technology mean that now is the right time to re-engage your IT colleagues about tackling the remote office challenge.
•Date: 4th October 2006 • Region: World • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
