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The Origin of Backup and Recovery
In 1952, the world’s first successful tape drive was delivered, the IBM 726 with 12,500 bytes of capacity per reel. In 1956 the world’s first disk drive was delivered, the Ramac 350 with 5 megabytes of capacity. Though no one knew it at the time, two key events in the storage industry had just occurred; 1) the first storage hierarchy was created with online disk and offline tape storage and 2) the first storage management applications were born, namely backup and recovery. Backup and recovery were to become the primary storage management applications for the next 50 years as protecting valuable data became increasingly important. Will these traditional data protection applications survive the demands for ultra-high availability and the growing requirements for nearly instantaneous recovery of the 21st century? The answer to this question lies with the next generation backup and recovery solutions that are now gaining significant momentum.
Data protection is quickly becoming the most critical piece of IT strategies today. There are four fundamental stages in the lifecycle of digital data:
1) data creation
2) data access
3) data archive and
4) data deletion/destruction.
The deletion/destruction phase no longer applies to all data types as considerable amounts of data is being stored indefinitely if not forever for a variety of reasons. The overarching goal of data protection is to protect information that cannot be easily replaced or replaced at all throughout its meaningful lifecycle. Different levels of data protection exist and as expected, higher levels of data protection cost more to implement. Software errors, human errors, natural disasters, the increasing number of power failures, building damages, and destructive intrusion such as worms, viruses’ and spy-ware have turned data protection into a complex data management process. Improved data protection and security levels have evolved over the years from consistently improving the MTBF of hardware devices to implementing a variety of local and remote strategies to address the numerous causes of downtime.
Traditional Data Protection Options
There are multiple data protection options that traditionally cover the spectrum of RPO and RTO time frames. They are classified into the following categories: Backup, Disk Mirroring, Snapshot copy, CDP, and VTL. Backups are usually performed once a day during the backup window. A significant investment has occurred over the past 20 years to ensure that applications, especially database related, can be interrupted or paused during this window so that a reusable copy of the data can be made. Without this critical host software and backup process investment, the usability of the copy for recovery purposes, may be severely compromised since there’s no guarantee that all data for all transactions have been captured in a way that is understandable by the application.
Over the years, various approaches have evolved to shrink the time that applications are offline. This continues to be an area of investigation, however field testing over the application portfolio and diverse customer environments are critical with each new approach. Building the administrative processes, minimizing complexities in deploying the solution, ensuring coverage across all applications and gaining confidence in new approaches are some of the primary reasons why customers refuse or delay adopting new data protection technologies.
Full backup/restore applies to all data types and is the most common data protection method. This approach copies 100% of the data, usually a complete file or full volume, from primary disk to either tape or disk for backup. The backed-up copy is not executable and must be restored to become accessible by an application. In most cases, traditional backup and restore from a backup copy causes the application to be impacted or even stop for the duration of the process. The larger the object being backed up or restored, the longer the application and its customers must wait. For mission critical or revenue generating applications, any amount of time spent waiting for a backup or recovery operation to complete becomes very costly.
Full file or full volume backup and restores are the most time consuming of all the data protection techniques and may be difficult to schedule. Years of research have shown that much of the data being backed up is the same unchanged data that was previously backed up.
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