Achieving Rapid Data Recovery for IBM AIX Environments

Achieving Rapid Data
®Recovery for IBM AIX
Environments
An Executive Overview of TEchoStream for AIX WHITE PAPER
Introduction
Planning for recovery is a requirement in businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered, IT personnel 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 approaches available to me that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
. Can I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both my local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
. Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?
Business requirements are not the only mandates that may be driving the evolution of your recovery plan. Various industry-speci?c regulatory mandates, including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and SEC, specify requirements for data retention and recoverability. In meeting these requirements, businesses have to deal with a variety of risks to data: inadvertently deleted ?les or records (operator error), viruses or hackers that can cause data corruption or deletion, and natural disasters that may put much more than just your data at risk. Distributed or branch of?ces may also have ease of use requirements that may not apply to larger, more centralized businesses.
Do you have a plan that meets your recovery requirements to your satisfaction across these areas?


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Issues with Legacy Recovery Technologies
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, con?rm 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 (after several weeks) 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.
Leading analyst groups, such as Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is an old the Gartner Group, the Enterprise technology that has been available almost since the dawn of computing. There are Strategy Group and the Taneja several issues with tape-based backup: Group, state that as many as 1 in . Tape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially disruptive to your 4 backup tapes suffer from some applications; this issue is commonly referred to as the backup window problem. sort of problem that precludes performing a recovery. . Because of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups are usually not taken 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; this is problematic because your data is changing very frequently (on the order of seconds or minutes) and the fewer points in time you have a copy of (for recovery purposes) the more data loss on average occurs for a given recovery; this issue is commonly referred to as the recovery point objective (RPO) problem.
. Once its clear that a recovery needs to occur, it takes time to perform the recovery (e.g. ?nding the right tape, transporting it (if its offsite), restoring it to disk, restarting the application on top of the data, etc.); this issue is commonly referred to as the recovery time objective (RTO) problem.
. 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 risk. Widely publicized tape losses during physical transport (by truck) have hit large com... [download for more]