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One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The unabated growth of data has created tremendous challenges for safeguarding data in companies of all sizes. In a recent data protection survey, ESG Research found that respondents were most challenged with three key aspects of data protection:
1. Keeping pace with the capacity of data to protect
2. Reducing backup times
3. Affording storage systems
Interestingly, the latter two concerns are most likely a result of the first one.
Disk is being deployed in the backup process to address performance concerns. In fact, 67% of IT organizations surveyed are targeting disk in the backup process. Enterprise organizations are outpacing small and medium-sized companies with adoption of virtual tape libraries for implementing disk in the backup environment. ESG Research revealed that the greater the number of production servers, the greater the prevalence of VTL solutions (see Figure 1).
Enterprise organizations’ data protection environments are typically characterized as having more than one backup application in use, being more reliant on tape media and having less tolerance for downtime than smaller companies. VTLs are appealing to enterprise organizations because they allow organizations to leverage existing backup applications and processes. Further, data de-duplication technology is increasingly becoming a pre-requisite for a viable enterprise VTL deployment. De-duplication radically reduces the physical disk required for the VTL solution, and allows more data to be retained on disk—increasing the likelihood that a data recovery will occur from disk and enabling IT organizations to meet aggressive recovery objectives. At face value, many VTL vendors may look like a fit for these companies. There are, however, several additional concerns that should be addressed for enterprise-scale implementations.
Future-Proofing VTL Decisions
When selecting a VTL solution, it’s important to “future-proof” decisions by anticipating future needs and minimizing the possibility of negative consequences. Key considerations include: Performance The underlying hardware and software architecture of the VTL will determine its aggregate system performance. Regarding the hardware of the system, the quantity, type and speed of the connections from the backup initiator to the VTL appliance, as well as the power of the VTL server and the speed of the disks will determine aggregate throughput to the virtual tape drives. Performance scalability is also a key consideration. The ability to increase the number of connections to improve performance without causing disruption is important. Automated load balancing—where backup streams can be directed to the groups of disks with the best available performance—should also be a consideration. Capacity Scalability How the VTL allows for storage capacity growth over time is another important concern. Does the VTL have physical limitations to its disk storage? Can it leverage a SAN? If additional VTL appliances have to be added to the environment, can they be managed through a central console? Again, the underlying architecture of the VTL will determine how much flexibility there is in expanding storage capacity. Those that can adapt to future growth without a “forklift” upgrade or adding to the management burden are more enterprise-ready. Manageability The previously discussed scalability issues are directly related to how easy the VTL is to manage. IT organizations that adopt VTLs with scale limitations have to add more units as capacity or performance requirements demand. “VTL-sprawl” creates unexpected management issues because many VTLs don’t offer a consolidated view of individual systems. Data De-Duplication
For organizations employing a D2D2T strategy, ESG Research found that 66% of organizations retain data on disk for one week before being migrated to tape media.3 Organizations that require a week or more data retention on disk may want to investigate data de-duplication. Data de-duplication is the process of examining data to identify and eliminate redundancy. It can have a significant impact on the capacity of data stored, which, in turn, can deliver significant economic benefits. Given that de-duplication is a resource-intensive operation, and that de-duplication is a relatively new technology, key concerns for customers evaluating VTLs with a data de-duplication feature include the ability of the system to sustain high performance, to scale effectively and to allow for seamless non-disruptive management.
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