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When a disaster strikes, computer systems can be severely affected by unplanned downtime, carrying significant business costs to the organization. Research in this area points strongly to the long-term effects on a company's stock price and ongoing business operations when bu sinesses are faced with unplanned downtime. More and more critical business processes are highly dependent on information technology systems. This fact has led businesses to the realization that when IT systems crash, business grinds to a halt. A recent research study by the University of Texas found that 51 percent of businesses which suffer a major data loss close their doors forever. Data from the National Archives and Records Administration indicate that 93 percent of companies that are unable to access their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.
According to researchers at the University of California Berkeley, new stored information grew roughly 30 percent per year between 1999 and 2002. They estimate that five exabytes of new information were created in 2002, with 92 percent of this information being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard drives. New business compliance and regulatory statutes such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, and the Patriot Act are requiring businesses to not only store more information but to have the ability to easily locate and recover that information. Dependence on technology, along with regulatory and policy changes, means that increasingly large data volumes must be processed and therefore protected; the end result of which is that data growth of 100 percent per year is no longer uncommon.
The combination of massive data growth and increasing reliance on data availability means that data protection has never been more important-data is the lifeblood of any modern company. Modern companies are also competing in the global marketplace and as such need access to their data with greater frequency-24 hours a day in many cases. This creates a paradoxical problem for IT
Managers: more data must be backed up but the backup window to protect data is rapidly shrinking.
Backup windows are not the only thing shrinking in today's IT reality. IT budgets have to become leaner and meaner as businesses strive to increase profitability and gain competitive advantage. IT Managers need to "do more with less," which makes it imperative that they streamline processes and maximize the benefits of automation wherever possible. According to research firm IDC, more than 60 percent of the total cost of storage backup over a five-year period is related to labor costs. Because less than 50 percent of data protection and recovery tasks are automated, it is one of IT's most labor-intensive tasks.
These challenges leave IT departments with the need for an easily deployable data protection solution that is powerful, reliable, and agile while allowing IT decision makers to live within a tight budget.
Disk-based backup and the changing role of tape
Traditionally, data protection strategy has been built around tape. With the advent of lower cost Serial ATA (SATA)?based disk arrays, disk-based backup has been making inroads into areas where physical tape drives were once the primary means of data protection. Disk-based backup has several advantages over tape.
Two of the primary advantages of disk-based backup are speed and reliability. In many cases an increase in backup performance can be achieved by using disk-assisted backup techniques, thus solving the problems associated with the ?backup window." Disk has the advantage of being random access and does not suffer the same performance (repositioning) issues as tape when backing up lots of small files. Additionally backup to disk does not generally suffer from some error conditions that can cause backup jobs to tape to fail, for example, no media in the media pool, media coming to the end of its useful life, tape jams, and robotic failures. In fact, according to a 2004 report from the Yankee Group, tape unreliability prevented 42 percent of tape customers from restoring their data from tape during the previous year.
These advantages are leading to changes in the backup and recovery landscape. Historically, a majority of companies has used tape for both short-term and long-term data protection.
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