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The tape backup and restore CHALLENGE

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 8 - October 2006

TAPE BACKUP IS A VITAL PART OF THE SOLUTION ANY BUSINESS NEEDS WHEN STORING DATA. SO MUCH SO, THAT ALL OF THE ATTEMPTS TO WRITE TAPE OFF AS DEFUNCT, OBSOLETE, DEAD HAVE FAILED MISERABLY. YET TAPE HAS TO KNOW ITS PLACE - AND NEVER MORE SO THAN WHEN DISASTER STRIKES AND FULL RECOVERY OF YOUR SYSTEMS IS CRITICAL. bRIAN wALL REPORTS

The problems with tape backup are well known - companies have been dealing with them for decades. Tape backup requires downtime that a lot of companies can't afford, given the increasing demand for 24-hour data access. The backup window gets shorter and shorter; and therefore it gets harder and harder for companies to complete nightly backups. So much so, that the nightly backups are sometimes skipped or are incomplete.

With tape backup, you are guaranteed to lose hours (or maybe days) of data in the event of a disaster, because the nearest point in time to which you can recover your systems is the last time you completed a successful tape backup. With daily tape backup, if your system goes down today, the best you can do is recover to yesterday's data, which will be at least twelve hours old. Any changes to data that occurred during the day aren't backed up yet and may be lost for good.

If you've lost, or are worried about losing, hours or days of data, due to a system or application failure or even a virus, there are ways to ensure peace of mind. One solution that is targeted at overcoming such problems is Traveller Continuous Protection and Recovery (CPR) from DataCore. Traveller was conceived and developed specifically to capture and protect an entire data stream continuously - all the data and all the changes - without impacting the operational (production) environment. As DataCore European director Nick Broadbent explains it, "you simply 'dial back the clock' to re-establish a previous operational time.”

The DataCore Solution
Traveller CPR is a system that utilises time-shifting technologies to revolutionise backups, CDP, business continuance and other data integrity capabilities. It captures a complete repository of the state of all changes over time. It continuously protects and enables users to manage the timeline to optimise the use and timing of Traveller MakeTime volumes, snaps and backups.

In the world of humans, history and events, time travel remains speculative fiction. But in the world of data, it is now possible to travel the data timeline to any prior point in time, get what you need and return intact. There has been much anticipation about technologies like Continuous Data Protection (CDP) that allude to (but in current form have never fully realised) the possibility of returning data, quickly and easily, to a coherent state that existed at any of an infinite number of prior points in time.

According to Broadbent, DataCore software has made this a reality with Traveller CPR and its MakeTime Productivity software. "In any enterprise, changes to data (creating, deleting, moving, modifying) occur constantly," he points out. "Because of this, the data that exists at any instant is different to the data that exists at every other instant. The continuous succession of these states is so rapid that data in an enterprise can be understood as a continuum, a constant 'flow' of data.
“Traveller allows businesses to reach back and grab data that existed at any point in the continuum, so that it can be used with systems and applications. Critically, the data is retrieved as a coherent data set, it will not be useful until the correct state is rebuilt and coherency restored.

"Most other solutions, even some that claim to be CDP, rely upon snapshots - point in time data captured at intervals within the continuum," adds DataCore channel manager Keith Jospeh. "The main problem with relying upon snapshots [backups are a form of snapshot] are data loss and uncertainty. Because they capture only points within the continuum, and not the continuum itself, states that existed between those points are lost and cannot be recovered. That leads to high-risk guesswork. Basically, any solution that operates in that way is not a complete package, but more like granular snapshots glued together."

Broadbent adds: "The user must guess how many snapshots or backups to schedule and at what times to take them within any given time frame." This, he says, is akin to photographing a sporting event by setting your camera in advance of the event to automatically take photographs at specified intervals. You may be able to avoid taking a load of photographs during half-time, but for the most part you have got to hope you are lucky enough to capture the action you want.

"The gap problem is exacerbated because of the relationship between the growing volume of data and the time it takes to do a snapshot or backup, and the inverse relationship that snapshot/backup time has to productivity," he points out. "The more data an enterprise has, the more time it takes to do a snapshot or backup; and the more time they take, the less often they are done. The longer it takes to do a backup, the longer production systems are disrupted, because production systems must be stopped and applications quiesced while taking the snapshot or backup.

"The greater the negative impact on production of doing snapshots and backups, the less often they are done. When snapshots and backups are performed less often, gaps and the risk of losing data in those gaps grow. As a result, ironically, the gap problem is often at its worst in the places that can least afford the risk of gaps: highly productive, data-dependent enterprises."

Traveller captures the entire data continuum for the period defined by the user. There are no gaps and no guessing. Moreover, Traveller features Timeshifting, which allows snapshots and backups to be performed with 'zero-impact' to production systems. With Timeshifting, a virtual ‘MakeTime Volume’ is created from the precise state selected from the captured data continuum. The snapshot or backup can then be performed, using the MakeTime Volume, with no impact on production. Decisions like when to snapshot, when to backup and how often are easier, because they can be made or changed after Traveller has already captured the data continuum from which they will be created.

Broadbent refers to Traveller's ease of use and the speed at which it can create a complete, working MakeTime Volume of the state selected. "Traveller works at disk speed to dramatically reduce the time it takes to recover a state - typically from days to minutes," he states. Essentially, Traveller MakeTime Volumes capture a cross-server, cross-application and cross-storage group view of the data at exactly the same moment in time - a coherent data set image. This enables systems and applications to recover reliably, when recovery is the objective, and to begin working immediately with the MakeTime Volume when improved productivity through Timeshifting is the objective.

"It is easy to get started travelling the data timeline with Traveller," adds Broadbent. "The user does not have to discard or restructure the current data protection regime to begin using Traveller to protect against the high-risk data gaps that exist inherently within that regime or make any substantial investment in new equipment. Traveller is software that runs on standard PC servers and works with all types of storage.”

Existing processes and schedules can be maintained at the outset and evolved, based upon Traveller's capabilities, to more efficient and less disruptive processes, without compromising Traveller's ability to capture and produce MakeTime Volumes of any prior state within the continuum for True State recovery or parallel workflow.

“We want to give value and benefit to the customer,” Broadbent concludes, “not just in terms of time saving, but in money saving, too. So we are providing a business solution that is flexible, scalable and simple to use, yes, but that ensures a proper return on investment as well."
For more information about Traveller CPR software, visit www.datacore.com  or contact: info@datacore.com