Redesigning the Data Backup Plan

With more than 20 year years of high-tech expertise, Mike DiMeglio manages the product marketing activity for FalconStor’s data protection technologies.

MDiMeglio

Backup is now required to do more than just “back up.” A data backup plan must provide reliability, recoverability, and value like never before, especially in light of new e-discovery requirements, server virtualization, and tighter budgets. Backup is no longer just an IT function; it involves every department and should be a corporate-wide effort.

Backup is also painful, a challenge felt throughout the organization. Despite technological advances, the challenges organizations face continue, especially in regard to optimizing existent and future backup infrastructures. Unabated storage growth, required business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and implementation of server virtualization are challenging IT departments to efficiently ensure data is consistently backed up and protected.

CIOs know that the existing model of backup is consuming them with day-to-day tactical problems. Research confirms that this experience is widespread and indicates that it will lead to major change over the next two years. A top analyst firm has reported that by 2013 more than 75 percent of large enterprises will make changes to eliminate their outdated and burdensome backup windows.

However, prior to implementing new technologies, the IT team must review why and where the backup pain exists, evaluate prerequisites to implementing a new solution, and review available cost-effective disk-based backup methodologies.

Before Implementing, Consider This

Since the pain is felt throughout the company, any change or redesign will be under intense scrutiny. The IT department will be expected to provide immediate results, including meeting challenging backup windows, extending retention times, and supporting new server virtualization projects. Therefore, IT should consider these four items before beginning:

Additionally, many organizations need a more efficient solution for remote offices, the most vulnerable environments for data loss. While these servers need a backup solution, organizations do not want the expense and hassle of managing separate remote backup solutions nor the inefficiencies of tape transport for disaster recovery.

Disk is the New Tape

To deliver on these prerequisites, redesigned plans must first look to implement a disk-based storage system. Disk increases backup and recovery success rates to 99 percent or more while reducing the associated management time. Technological introductions like deduplication, high capacity, low-cost SATA drives, and WAN optimized replication have further added to disk’s appeal by making it as affordable and functional as tape.

Many forms of disk-based data protection are available for consideration. These include networked attached storage (NAS) or virtual tape libraries (VTLs). In fact, VTL with deduplication makes the most sense for organizations that currently use tape as their primary backup targets and offers a few key advantages:

Optimizing disk-based backup with data deduplication is seen as the way to combat tight IT budgets with an easy-to-deploy solution that is easy to manage. VTLs increase backup speeds and success rates while keeping backup data stores under control.

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