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Introduction
Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From IT departments to the Board Room, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability. This white paper will provide a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
Planning for recovery—designing and implementing a solution to reduce the amount of recovery time needed after an interruption—is a pressing requirement for businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered quickly, IT managers are generally confronted with several challenges:
- How can I ensure my applications and data are recoverable without impacting business operations?
- Do I have data protection strategies available to me that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
- Can I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
- Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?
Bottom Line: Businesses face a variety of risks to their data such as accidentally deleted files, data corruption from viruses or hacker attacks, software/hardware failures, power outages or any of a wide range of natural disasters. Business and IT managers need a data protection and recovery strategy that keeps the organization’s business doing business. For AIX IT departments, this is a high priority.
Tape Backups: First Line of Defense
If you’re like most businesses, you’re using some form of data protection today—probably tape-based backup. Periodically, someone shuts applications down to perform a backup to tape. Depending on the volume of data that is being copied, this may take several hours and requires manual intervention to set up the backup job, run it, confirm that it occurred, and then return the application to operation.***
The backup copy may be kept locally in case data needs to be recovered in the near term, and eventually it may be moved to an offsite location for archival storage purposes. The reason to make and keep copies of your data is so that, in the event of some sort of event or catastrophe that deletes or destroys data, you have a clean copy safely tucked away to use for recovery purposes.
Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is an old technology that has been available almost since the dawn of computing. There are several issues with tape-based backup:
- Tape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially disruptive to your applications; this issue is commonly referred to as the backup window problem.
- Because of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups are usually not performed more than once a day, and often only once every several days, meaning that there are very few tape-based recovery points available for use over the course of a week.
- Because your data is changing very frequently (on the order of seconds or minutes), fewer recovery points mean you are risking the loss of large amounts of current data for a given recovery.
- Once it is clear that a recovery needs to occur, it takes time to perform recovery tasks including locating the correct tape, transporting it (if it’s offsite), restoring it to disk and restarting the application with the recovered data.
- As a storage media for backup, tape is not entirely reliable; in fact, leading analyst groups such as the Gartner Group, the Enterprise Strategy Group and the Taneja Group state that as many as 1 in 4 backup tapes suffer from some sort of problem that precludes performing a recovery
Transporting tapes to offsite facilities for archival purposes also has inherent risks. Recently publicized tape losses during physical transport (by truck) have hit large companies like Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., ChoicePoint Inc. and LexisNexis in the U.S. and resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of company records.
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