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The challenge of managing, protecting and storing digital data is a major issue for businesses of every size and category. Companies generally rank the improvement of their storage infrastructure as a top objective, and the escalation of data protection costs has become an overriding concern. According to recent research, the data storage capacity of the average North American enterprise is now 59 terabytes, and the projected annual production data growth is 20 to 30 percent.
Fully 69-percent of enterprise data is backed up using tape and disk/tape-based solutions, and this serial technology limitation is largely responsible for a massive growth in data protection cost. Tape-based backup restricts ready access to data as well as the ability of businesses to meet the latest compliance and privacy mandates.
This paper reviews data protection challenges common to business, industry and governmental operations, and describes a new third-generation technology that can deliver enterprise-wide backup and restoration from a single site with immediate, anytime data validation and unlimited scalability. The primary benefit of this advancement in data protection is its potential to substantially improve enterprise-wide control and reduce both direct and indirect data protection costs.
Background
According to current figures, companies spend from $5 to $7 to manage each dollar in hardware/software investment. The cost of operating a unit of primary storage is estimated to be five or more times its initial acquisition value, attributable primarily to backup, handling, transport and restoring data.
Approximately 80% of a firm's files remain unchanged over time. Nonetheless, conventional backup processes require that every file on every computer be periodically backed up and stored, or that only selected files be backed up. And while it should be possible to find and restore a particular version of a particular file using conventional backup/restore methodology, the cost is likely to be high, with unreasonably long "time-to-data." Backup methodologies in use at most companies today are assembled on the basis of fixed storage capacity and defined performance limits. Yet data continues to grow exponentially, and organizational reliance on valuable data is absolute. The conventional corporate response to growth is to upgrade to faster tape drives, larger disk subsystems, better software and greater network capacity in the quest to keep pace with moving backup/restore targets. The resulting budgetary outlay and ongoing administrative costs are enormous.
This ongoing expense include staff time to purchase media, manage inventory, label, load and unload tapes, rotate, retire, transport, and store tapes off-site. Should a restore be required, administrators must first determine what file is needed, which generation, and where it resides in a backup set, and then retrieve, load and locate files. Data protection can cost a firm as much as $300/GB per year.
Another critical aspect of the growth in digital information has been the imposition of highly-demanding compliance requirements intended to aid law enforcement, combat fraud, support litigation and protect the privacy of individuals. Collectively these regulations have substantial impact across a wide range of governmental and business interests, and in some cases they impose file validation, data retrieval, substantiation and reporting requirements that are well beyond the practical capacities of tape and disk/tape-based data protection technologies.
For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a governmental response to recent account scandals by public corporations, imposes demanding data security and accessibility requirements on corporate information.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), is a comprehensive set of Federal regulations intended to protect the privacy of personal health information. Like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the compliance provisions of this Act are demanding and require a response level that often exceeds the abilities of organizations under its jurisdiction.
The body of judicial standards known as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is periodically amended, most recently in 2006. This body of rules has a profound impact on the use, storage and retrieval of digital information used in legal proceedings, including financial data as well as email archives and other corporate correspondence. It poses yet another serious data backup and retrieval challenge.
Other compliance-related regulations that bear on data backup and retrieval requirements today include the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, the California Civil Codes Information Practices Act and the European Union Data Protection Directives.
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