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KNOW YOUR ENEMY

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 7 - October 2007

The first step towards a data protection management strategy is to understand your applicable threat risks, says Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, the StorageIO Group

More and more data continues to be accessed, generated and stored from remote and branch offices of various sized businesses, including small business (SMB). Given the increasing number and diversity of threats to information and privacy concerns, data protection needs to be understood and managed.

Now a new industry trends and technology perspective white paper, 'Three Ways to Ensure Trouble-free Remote Backup: Tips for Better Data Protection at Remote and Branch Offices' - authored by Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, the StorageIO Group - looks specifically at the threats that businesses face; the options to guard and protect their data; and how they might best identify solutions that meet their particular needs.

According to Schulz, to operate an effective data protection management strategy, first you need to understand your applicable threat risks - and then know your options to protect and secure your information.

"Is the data at your remote sites regularly backed up? Not just your servers but your desktops and laptops? Are you confident you can restore reliably from your remote backups? Remote site data management can be a headache, but there are simple solutions," he points out.

It should be no surprise that the amount of data being generated and stored continues to grow at a staggering rate. Also, more of that data is now stored or accessed outside of the traditional data centre - and stored for longer periods of time. "This data needs to be protected and stored away from where it is used [eg, off-site] and needs to be available for timely restoration, recovery of deleted files, or complete system recovery.

"So the problem is how to make sure that all data, including data in remote offices and branch offices, is being backed up to a separate location in a timely and efficient manner,” states Schulz. “This is not a problem unique to large enterprises with distributed remote offices and branch offices (or ROBOs). Small and medium sized businesses increasingly experience the same issue."

ON-SITE TAPE
ROBO backup pain points include:
• Maintaining a regular backup schedule at remote sites
• Leveraging traditional backup software designed for back up to tape
• Cost and complexity of automated technologies or lack of network bandwidth
• Limited amount of time to complete a comprehensive backup
• Disruptive nature of backups and impact on productivity
• Lack of trained personnel to make sure backups function as planned
• Limited scalability, in terms of performance and flexibility
• Incomplete backups lacking data for complete restoration and recovery.

"Backup and restoration in general are not just about protecting against disasters; local copies of backups can also be used in conjunction with snapshots for rapid recovery of accidentally deleted or corrupted files," adds Schulz. "There are a couple of pieces to this. First, there is the classic remote office, branch office (ROBO), also known as a satellite or perhaps a departmental division or workgroup, where data needs to be protected with regular backup. Then there are regular offices of various sizes that need to have their data backed up to a remote site, perhaps to a secondary site or to a managed service provide (MSP)."

There are many techniques and technologies to support data protection, including backup, replication and mirroring and snapshots, he points out. "Backup makes a copy of the data as of a particular point in time to provide data protection against loss or destruction of data and is complimentary to other data protection techniques, including mirroring, replication, RAID, snapshots and continuous data protection.

"Replication, also known as mirroring (not to be confused with RAID-1 disk drive mirroring), maintains a real-time (synchronous) or near-real-time, time delayed (asynchronous) copy of data from one location to another, providing sustained accessibility to data.” Replication should be combined with some other form of data protection, including backup to protect against loss or destruction of data.

"Snapshots, also known as point-in-time (pit) copy, take a picture or copy of the data as of a particular point in time. However, unlike backup - where changed data is actually copied to some other medium - snapshots (which can be full or partial) make a copy of the pointers that point to changed data, which is much faster than performing a backup and data copy. Snapshots can be combined with replication to make a high-speed copy of data as of a particular point in time that can than be backed up or copied off-line.

SOLUTION OPTIONS
ROBO and SMB environments have many options for data backup to guard against accidental file deletion, infected or corrupted files, and to support business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR).

"Your data backup strategy may involve multiple technologies and techniques, including periodic backup and mirroring or replication of data to ensure applications are protected and remain accessible.

“An effective ROBO backup strategy addresses rapid restoration, recovery and restart of applications with as much transparency as possible. Depending on recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) requirements, various options and permutations of technology combinations can be deployed."

ON-SITE TAPE
A common starting point for businesses, states Schulz, is to leverage an automated tape loader, stacker or mini-library or small optical jukebox at remote sites.
"These backup devices are coupled with either entry-level backup or modified enterprise tape-centric backup software to perform daily or weekly backups," he points out.

"This approach often leads to problems with media or tape handling, manual troubleshooting as to why the backups did not complete on time or why they failed to backup all required data. On-site tape, unless stored in a fire and waterproof vault, does not protect a site in case of a local disaster where tapes may be damaged.
“Consequently, best practice has been to manually ship tapes to an off-site facility, introducing the risk of lost or misplaced tapes.” Today, he says, IT managers looking for solutions to alleviate pain associated with ROBO backup have powerful new options.

REMOTE BACKUP
Remote backup software is employed when data and servers need to be maintained at remote locations to support various business requirements. Remote servers, desktops and laptops are backed up over a network to a central location or to a managed service provider (MSP).

This approach is often combined with disk to disk (D2D) and other variations of disk to disk data protection (3DP) techniques, including continuous data protection (CDP). The benefit of agent-less remote backup is that it enables rapid restoration of data, whether from accidental file deletion, corruption or infection, and also supports recovery and restart for BC and DR purposes.

NAS REPLICATION
NAS replication is employed when it makes sense to deploy a standalone NAS device at the remote site. "The NAS device is replicated on an ongoing basis to another NAS device centrally located or at a peer location, creating an exact copy of all files, files systems and snapshot copies. This replication may be one-to-one or many-to-one, in the case of multiple remote locations; that is, multiple remote sites can all be backed up to one central NAS." ST

Greg Schulz is founder and senior analyst of the StorageIO group, as well as author of 'Resilient Storage Networks - Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures' (Elsevier).