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BEWARE THE TICKING CLOCK!

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 2 - March/April 2007

The importance of backup has been so widely documented - indeed screamed from the rooftops - that surely organisations no longer fail to take this extremely seriously. Or do they? Editor Brian Wall has been finding out

When it comes to data backup, the reality is that many organisations are still not protecting their vital data, even though best practice and good old-fashioned common sense dictate they should.

After all, the potential hazards to which data is prey are manifold: from water damage, computer viruses and major power outages, through to natural disasters and data theft. At the extreme end, the repercussions for not implementing the proper backup and procedures can mean going out of business. Investing in the proper safeguards seems a relatively modest price to pay by comparison.

"Yes, there are still people ignoring the message," says Guy Bunker, chief scientist, Symantec. "While all large organisations have a backup strategy in place, many of the smaller companies do not. SMBs and SMEs often understand the need for backup, but do not believe they have the time, resources or money to put in a solution, whereas, in fact, backup products have become easier to use and cheaper to run."

There seems little excuse, therefore, not to have in place the right procedures for protecting data so that it is recoverable and useful. It is then a matter of applying the approach that best matches the organisation's specific requirements. This may be driven by corporate goals or external factors, such as the need to comply with data protection regulations, for example.

So how do you decide what is best for your business? Companies of all sizes need dependable data protection, but the methods of safeguarding business information can vary enormously. SMBs, in particular, have to establish how much storage they need - and how much they can afford. Then there is the thorny question of how to recover lost, stolen or damaged data. And how can you ensure your operations remain up and running when a disaster shuts down one or more of your sites?

"The easiest and best place to start is to ask what data do you have, where is it located and how important is it to you," states Bunker. "You need to consider web site content, applications (such as email, financial, CRM, etc) and files - often Microsoft Office files contain critical information such as orders, financial spreadsheets and strategy presentation.

“Regarding where this is, servers are a great place to start, both application and file servers. After that, it is worth considering laptops and desktops. Many organisations ignore laptops and desktops, with a policy of having the users put their information on a file server. While this creates a simpler solution, because it is not complete - and people tend to forget and not copy their files to a server - it is often a false economy."

Backup software should be, in the main, transparent. Once installed and the appropriate processes are put around it, it should be virtually maintenance free. As Bunker points out, "in the big corporations, thousands of servers are backed up, often by just one person. Ultimately, there is no excuse!"

What kinds of backup software are now on the market? And what levels of external skills and support are needed to put it into practice - at what cost?

"Backup software has been around since computers were first switched on and crashed, so basically forever," says Bunker. "And there have been a great many advances in that time. Hot backup enables applications to be backed up while the application is still running, whilst 'continuous data protection' is new to the scene, enabling fast, frequent, continuous backups to occur - which means even less data will be lost, should the system crash.

"Desktops and laptops can also be brought into the scheme such that, when remote users attach to the network, their machines are silently and transparently backed up, with only the changes being sent across the wire, minimising time and bandwidth. Finally, the technology for holding the data is changing, moving from tapes to disks. Disks make life easier for all, while new functionality makes it easier for individuals to recover data from the backups. The underlying technology advances make 'single instance storage' (SIS) a reality, so only one copy of a file is actually stored, even if everyone has a copy on their laptop."

The skills needed to install a backup solution are not huge - servers, desktops and laptops can be discovered and backup clients pushed out to them. Some planning will probably be needed in order to size the backup storage required. "There are consultants who can do this or training courses from vendors which will enable it all to be done in-house. There will also be some support needed: it might be to rotate tapes in a tape library or to add new systems to the backup policy. However, it's not rocket science to achieve this without chewing up a large amount of administrator time."

And what about cost - how much does that matter? Bunker's take is that this will greatly depend on the nature of your business and how critical your data is. "If you can afford to lose your website, and the downtime is acceptable without a backup solution, then that is fine. However, in most circumstances, for a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, peace of mind will exist in the shape of a backup solution."

According to Paul Terrell, UK GM Syncsort, the skills and resources necessary to implement sensible and thorough data protection and disaster recovery practices are, in reality, quite minimal. "It's simply a matter of itemising the corporate data stores and establishing recovery objectives for each data set, based on its importance to the business. Once recovery objectives are designated, the proper tools to accomplish the objectives can be employed. For very critical data sets, frequent recovery points and short recovery times may require a CDP or Near-CDP application, while less time-sensitive data volumes can be protected using traditional backup software and removable media, such as tapes or CDs."

For many businesses, there are additional considerations that will often come into play, such as business applications at remote sites and server operating systems. In order to simplify the process with minimal impact, Terrell recommends frequently copying operating system and remote site data into the primary data centre using block level 'incremental forever' technology. This allows the company to apply the same recovery objective operations to these unique data categories.

Once they have established recovery point and recovery time objectives, Syncsort offers several software tool options. Its Near CDP Advanced Protection Manager, for example, supports data centre applications, as well as remote data and operating system images. By including integrated bare metal recovery, the same software is utilised for disaster recovery. Additionally, Syncsort's Backup Express product is another tool that customers often use to manage traditional scheduled backup processes for medium-impact, centralised data.

"As regards the backup software market in general, we are seeing companies place a greater emphasis on the importance of protecting valuable data than in the not too distant past," reports Terrell. "Software companies have for a long time been preaching the message that backup and restore should be viewed as an insurance policy, and companies have insurance covering all aspects of their business, so why not the data that is key to their success?"

He also notes that companies are now prepared to assign more qualified staff to be responsible for the backup function, rather than view it as a necessary evil, as perhaps was the case in the past. "Irrespective of what solution a company employs, the backup function is only as good as its ability to restore. A number of companies encounter problems by failing to deploy a solution that allows restores in an acceptable timeframe or that covers all of their backup needs."

Backup is not always as straight- forward a process as one might wish, however, warns John Posavatz, VP of product management, The Neverfail Group. "The problem with using backup as a company's central recovery strategy lies not so much in the technology itself, but in the customer's understanding and appreciations of its limitations.

"While backup technologies have improved, they remain a 'last resort' disaster recovery solution. Their real value is to help a company recover from more improbable scenarios, such as hardware failures leading to data loss. An organisation reliant solely on backup software will have to accept downtime as an inevitability, since the time taken to restore data is always a factor.

“For less critical applications, this may not be a problem - users may be able to do without access for the hours or days that it takes to restore from the backup. However, for mission-critical applications, an organisation must have a business continuity solution in place that guarantees high-availability," he says.

In the past, ensuring high availability was an expensive and complex proposition. Today, high-availability software is available and affordable to even the smallest of organisations. So the challenge now, adds Posavatz, is in choosing the right solution - and making it an organisational priority. "Many companies are still lagging in prioritising and selecting this technology, but once an organisation experiences downtime first-hand, high availability becomes a no-brainer.

“Provided customers understand the limitations of backup solutions, these types of solutions can sometimes be a more cost-effective approach than a complete business continuity solution. However, organisations must define what level of downtime, if any, they are willing to accept. If downtime is not acceptable, then backup is not the approach to consider."

Backup is not a universal panacea that functions without its own pain and problems, though. Steven Rose, VP EMEA & ANZ, CommVault, says one of the downsides of backup is that it rarely delivers a reward. "Compare it, if you will, to a parent trying to deal with a constantly naughty child. Even recovery, the whole point of backup, is often a painful, rare exercise carried out for someone else. Looking at the latest analyst polls, the ongoing issues around backup centre on the fact that backups are still taking too long, recoveries are equally lengthy, manual effort is considerable, and process monitoring and media management is poor."

Who is to blame for this current state of affairs? Is it the poor practices of IT managers and staff? Or are software vendors looking the other way and therefore failing to address the problem head on? The truth, argues Rose, lies somewhere in the middle.

"In the case of the larger storage software vendors, just about all of them have acquired companies to plug the gaps in their portfolios, leaving complex inter-relationships between their solutions that slow down product development. The proliferation of point products leaves end users struggling with ever more different interfaces and GUIs. Just managing backups from a single vendor alone may require five or more separate products simply to support the different platforms and provide some level of reporting."

Companies such as CommVault, he says, offer a set of data management solutions that have been unified from the start by a common architecture, and can help lower costs and cut through the complexity by managing backups from a single pane of glass. "In best practice terms, backup should be considered as part of a wider data management and protection strategy. If data is getting out of control, then backups will, too. Data management is often neglected, due to of a dysfunctional relationship between IT and business, with IT not understanding organisational objectives or the business making unreasonable demands of IT. The good news is that, if you recognise that you have a 'naughty child', at least now you can swap it for one that is better behaved - a choice no parent ever has!" ST