Making sense of IT challenges: it’s ugly out there

By i365, A Seagate Company

In order to understand the cost advantages of online backup, it is first important to understand the challenges that businesses face in protecting their business-critical data.

The reliance on data and application availability has created internal and external challenges for business owners and their IT staff. As data volumes grow rapidly, IT personnel are asked to manage more projects. They struggle to support more computers and people across distributed environments because of the disproportionate amount of time spent on managing backup tasks. These issues can be made worse by company expansion or acquisition when additional time and resources are needed to create, integrate and standardize new processes.

External forces are also adding to the backup-related challenges that organisations are facing today. Heightened awareness around business continuity and regulatory compliance has caused businesses to increase spending on their data protection activities. In fact, companies spent an estimated $5.5 billion to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley alone in 2004. [1] While compliance and headline-grabbing disasters are often credited for increased focus on business continuity, the truth remains that IT staffs must solve difficult, everyday issues if they are going to maintain optimum data availability. Traditional tape backup or even local disk-to-disk data protection is no match for these daunting challenges, i.e. shrinking backup windows, rapid data growth, lack of central control over distributed systems, increasing rate of central control over distributed systems and increasing rate of recovery failure.

The problem with tape

For more than 50 years, businesses have utilised tape-based backup schemes. While proponents tout low media costs and portability, tape backup increases the amount of time and effort needed to administer backup and recovery tasks. Slower backup and recovery speeds – Tape’s linear recording format takes more time to write and restore backup data when compared to the random-access capability of disk. Tape restore times are further slowed by having to locate and mount the media to find the needed information.

Manual intervention is required to get data off-site – without manual intervention, backup tapes remain in the tape drive, leaving the data vulnerable to physical events. While
disk-to-disk backup (external drives, appliances) is attempting to solve this problem, it is only adequate for short periods of time. Ultimately, data must be moved off-site.

Inability to verify backup data – Most people do not turn on the option to “verify after write” on their tape drives because this adds 30 to 50% to the time required to complete the backup. No quick 24x7 access to data for recovery – If tapes are removed from the drives to be sent off-site, there is a significant delay in those tapes returning for recovery purposes.

Now is the time for online backup

Mature technology and falling disk prices are driving adoption. Market conditions and IT administrators’ ever-growing weariness of tape backup have caused businesses to seriously
consider the security, reliability, availability and scalability advantages of online backup. Technology maturation and other market conditions have also contributed to the traction online backup and recovery has made over the past few years. Adoption of disk-based storage rose by 114% from 1999 to 2002. [2] Other market factors contributing to this adoption include:

• Continued price reductions in reliable and high-bandwidth network connections
• Large and easily scalable RAID storage systems lowering in price, increasing in reliability
• Acceptance of encryption security methods
• Regulations mandating off-site storage have superseded concerns about moving data to third-party data centres
• Automation provides added security layer

From a security perspective, online backup uses industry standard encryption algorithms that have made data transport over private or public networks no longer a concern for many distributed businesses. In fact, security is enhanced compared to manually managing removable tape media and engaging untrained staff in remote locations.

Online backup centralises resources, which improves the security and reliability of backup tasks. For larger organisations, IT staff are centralised at their data centres, while tape backup devices and unqualified personnel tasked with managing them are located in remote offices. Online backup enables remote installation and management of agents that initiate the backup process and push backed up data to a central repository.

A 2004 survey of IT executives revealed that more than 40% of respondents had been unable to recover data from tape in the past year because of media unreliability. [3] A year earlier, an end-user survey indicated that 52% of the respondents believed their current backup/recovery solutions left their data somewhat exposed. [4]

Efficient processes and improved resource centralization have made online backup a more reliable choice over tape backup. Delta-block scanning techniques, for example, minimise the volume of data travelling across the network. These techniques give businesses the equivalent of full backups in a smaller storage footprint because only new or changed data blocks are compressed, encrypted and then backed up and copied to hard disk. Having less data to backup provides financial benefits that cascade throughout a company. Over time, an inefficient backup process may become the de facto operational method that dictates corporate policies for businesses. Instead, corporate policies should dictate IT procedures and processes. Online backup enables administrators to set up policies that eliminate error-prone manual processes associated with tape-based backup such as swapping tapes for backups and having to retrieve them in a restore situation.

Online Backup Makes Sense

Online backup places significantly less data on storage arrays than the incremental methods used by tape-based software. Delta-block processing techniques within online backup are extremely fast and efficient. Similar to incrementals, only new or altered files are backed up. However, once an initial, full or “seed” backup has been sent to the electronic storage device, every subsequent backup is the equivalent of a full backup. To conduct a restore in this scenario, an administrator accesses the GUI to make a file or folder restore. No manual retrieval and assembly of full and incremental tapes are needed.

IT staff face more challenges than ever before to keep costs in check as they service employees and customers who are increasingly dependent on data access and intolerant of
downtime. A convergence of regulatory and economic drivers, as well as technical innovations has led thousands of businesses to implement online backup. i365, A Seagate Company’s EVault online backup provides businesses with the solution that best fits their needs. By controlling the growth of data being backed up, EVault customers quickly realise significant cost savings. They are also better able to support the backup and restores of remote offices and meet applicable regulatory requirements. The IT functions in your business are complicated enough. For the business majority, adding data protection expertise as a core competency simply does not make fiscal sense. Turning that function over to the leader in online backup and recovery – i365, A Seagate Company – will save you time, money and aggravation. i365 has the right online backup solution for companies like yours that are serious about protecting their business-critical data.

Notes:
1 AMR Research
2 “How Much Information?” study, University of California, Berkeley, 2003
3 Yankee Group survey, March 2004
4 Enterprise Storage Group, May 2003