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An organization’s data is its lifeblood, and protecting that data is a strategic activity for information technology professionals. Backup is no longer a tactical housekeeping issue; it has become the focus of risk-management strategies that encompass data availability, data retention, compliance, data discovery, and data security. Not only is the backup environment becoming more complex, the amount of data to be backed up is growing exponentially and the risks associated with data loss are becoming ever more punitive. Just meeting service-level agreements for completing backups during agreed-upon backup windows and getting data off site can be a significant challenge for many companies. Backup windows for global organizations are not only shrinking, they are becoming a luxury that companies can no longer afford. Data growth and management complexity are putting so much stress on previous-generation backup systems that the ability to meet backup windows and recovery time requirements is in constant jeopardy. The rising costs of backup management create an additional concern by making it increasingly difficult to fund the infrastructure improvements that are necessary to meet ever more demanding levels of data availability.
Backup to tape remains the most widely deployed backup solution in use today, but disk-to-disk backup—or D2D—is rapidly gaining ground. As many storage-industry observers can attest, D2D backup is increasingly seen as the antidote to the reliability and performance problems that characterize tape backup solutions. SearchStorage, the online publication of Applied Computer Science, Ltd., reports that D2D backup was the top search topic for the online magazine in 2006. In addition, Forrester Research1 reports that 55% of the 400 IT executives that they interviewed in August of 2006 say that they are already using disk as a staging area and target backup repository before vaulting to tape. And according to the Gartner Group, a global technology research and advising firm, by 2008 the majority of data restores will occur from disk, not from tape.
Low-cost SATA drives, combined with advances in data management technologies, make D2D backup a vital component of any data protection strategy today. Assessing the wide array of D2D options can be daunting. In this paper, we compare the different types of disk backup solutions and offer guidance in identifying the solutions that will meet your needs.
DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES
All data protection strategies are subject to the same challenges and outside pressures. The strategies that you choose must take these considerations into account.
Rampant data growth. No thriving organization is exempt from the pressures of managing and storing ever-increasing amounts of data. The amount of data that must be transferred, stored, and managed is straining traditional backup infrastructures. Your data protection strategy needs to be scalable to accommodate explosive data growth.
Shrinking backup windows. All global operations that must be up and running 24x7 are confronting shrinking backup windows. It is not uncommon for a full backup to take an entire weekend and for an incremental backup to take all night. At the same time that backups are taking longer to complete, backup windows are getting smaller. Almost half of the IT executives responding to a recent Mercer Group2 survey stated that completing backups in the required time windows is the biggest challenge that they face today. And it is no wonder: Data that must be backed up is measured in hundreds of terabytes.
Escalating backup costs. Unbridled costs for media and management are the direct result of the data explosion. These costs are robbing strategic data-center initiatives of valuable resources.
Performance bottlenecks. Getting data off primary storage and onto backup devices without creating performance bottlenecks can be a big challenge when you have tens to hundreds of terabytes to back up.
Compliance requirements and legal discovery demands. Data must be secure, unalterable, and in some cases immediately accessible in order to comply with regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States, the European Union Data Protection Directive, and Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (J SOX). Furthermore, litigation support and e-discovery have emerged as major IT and business challenges. The rising penalties for noncompliance are making remote-site backup a critical issue. Remote sites require the same level of protection and access to data as the data center, but limited infrastructure and personnel make that an almost impossible goal to achieve. The lack of visibility into backups and information stored on backup tapes at remote sites is putting many organizations at risk.
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