The money and sense of online backup

A White Paper by i365, A Seagate Company

Businesses today face unrelenting data growth. IT staffs are struggling to ensure data availability under tight fiscal constraints. The unreliability and intensive management of traditional tape-based backup has forced backup administrators to create manual, error-prone processes in order to protect their data. Consequently, other critical objectives, such as supporting distributed environments and complying with regulatory requirements, are not being adequately met.

Online backup, offered as a managed service, answers these challenges by leveraging existing server and network infrastructures to securely and efficiently protect servers and desktops against data loss. Its ability to immediately move backed-up copies of data securely off-site, away from any potential site disaster, is a key differentiator. Greater security and reliability, and easier, more centralized administration, suggest that online backup is the right choice for businesses that are serious about protecting their business-critical data.

But is online backup really more cost-effective than traditional backup methods?

IT Challenges: It’s ugly out there

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 staffs. 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 add to the backup-related challenges that organizations face. Heightened awareness around business continuity and regulatory compliance cause 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.

The problem with tape

For more than 50 years, businesses have utilized 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 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) can be used to address this problem, it is only adequate for short periods of time. Ultimately, data must be moved off-site. With tapes, this is always a manual process. Disk-based backup eliminates the time and risk.

Inability to verify backup data. Most people do not turn on the option to “verify after write” on their tape drives because this adds 30-50% to the time required to complete the backup.

No quick 24/7 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, falling disk prices drive 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 that online backup and recovery has gained. 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 centers

Automation provides added security layer
From a security perspective, online backup uses industry-standard encryption algorithms that eliminate concerns about transporting data over private or public networks. In fact, security is significantly enhanced compared to manually managing tape media and engaging untrained staff in remote locations.

Online backup centralizes resources, which improves the security and reliability of backup tasks. For larger organizations, IT staffs are centralized at their data centers, 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.

Increased reliability drives better processes, lowers cost
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, minimize the volume of data traveling 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:

• Less data means disk drives fill up at a slower pace than with file-based full or incremental backup methods
• IT personnel have the option to keep backups on disk for longer periods without incurring financial repercussions as quickly
• Organizations can expect considerable cost savings by devoting less time to remote office backup administration, off-site storage and emergency retrieval costs and tape media management
• Businesses do not have to upgrade their infrastructure to take advantage of online backup services.

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.

The money and sense of online backup

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.

So far, this paper has discussed how online backup efficiently helps solve today’s most pressing data availability and protection issues. But is there also a way to show how online backup saves money. The answer is a compelling yes.

Business Case
Key Assumptions:

• 250GB of original data
• 20% compression = 200GB of compressed data
• Retention Policy = One month of data stored online
• 6 daily backups online
• 4 weekly backups online
• Daily data change rate
• 2% average for Delta-block processing* [* Achievable with EVault DeltaPro™]
• 5% average for Incremental style backup (tape or disk)

Every IT environment is different, and there are several variables in terms of hard and soft costs that make the case for online backup even more compelling. The complexity of a company’s IT environment (e.g. distributed offices, heterogeneous servers, large databases) and its data retention policies also help determine the ROI from deploying online backup. This example focuses on the core difference in costs between the full/incremental approach used by traditional backup software and delta-block processing techniques, such as DeltaPro™ from i365 EVault Data Protection Solutions. Because each week a full backup is required using incrementals, the total after just five weeks is 1.06TB. Taking EVault’s DeltaPro as an example and using the same retention policy, only 304GB has been added over the same period.

If that difference in capacity is applied to a business looking to outsource its backup and recovery processes, the cost delta from just data growth alone is quite significant. Online backup prices can vary based on the amount of data stored, length of customer contract and other factors. Average pricing for tape-based ($10/GB) and online backup ($20/GB) was used before multiplying those prices by the amount of data stored on the respective media:
   1.06TB x €10/GB = €10,600
   304GB x €20/GB = €6,080
   Cost savings: €4,520 after just one month in data costs alone

The cost savings from deploying online backup will only increase as data volumes grow. The €4,520 is only one month of cost savings, which can compound over the course of several months or years.

Still not convinced? Consider downtime and the loss of money and reputation it can bring. Analyst firm International Data Corp. (IDC) estimates that companies lose an average of €84,000 for every hour of downtime. However, your business does not have to be in the Fortune 1000 to feel the financial crunch from data loss. As pointed out earlier in this paper, many tapes are not readable come time to conduct a restore.

What if a single, significant restore is needed from tape and your business is down for two hours? Many businesses will need to restore data several times throughout the year. Even if your business does not experience substantial downtime, there is significant ROI from online backup. Automated, point-and-click restores when you need them will result in significant resource savings, and keep your business running smoothly. And, while more intangible, there is the peace of mind gained from working with a trusted online backup service provider and knowing that business-critical data is securely stored off-site and immediately available.

Factors for evaluating vendors
Before choosing an online technology provider, weigh the following technology and cost considerations and do not be shy about asking the tough questions. If they are to be your trusted partner, learn upfront their capabilities and cost structure.

What to look for:

• Automated and unattended backups with the ability to backup open files and open databases
• Ability to centrally manage the backup and restore process from one or more locations
• Control of files and directories to be backed up, with file-filtering capabilities
• Secure, Tier-1 facility
• Spontaneous file restores 24x7x365 via end user or central administrator control
• No special hardware requirements or changes to your network
• Ability to restore data either over the network or via a dedicated storage device
• Customizable data retention schedules
• Data encryption while data is stored on the storage array and during transmission over private or public networks
• Automatic restart and resume capabilities for handling a variety of network conditions
• Automatic notification of exceptions and problems encountered
• Detailed usage reporting capabilities

i365 EVault Data Protection Solutions: Creating value through online backup and recovery

With more than 22,000 customers, including hundreds of legal, financial, and health care organizations, i365’s EVault is the global leader in secure online backup and recovery.
EVault Software software can be provisioned as either a managed service or as licensed software used by IT administrators in larger organizations. EVault Software includes three software modules (Agent, CentralControl and Director) that work together to provide backup and recovery, supporting more operating systems than any other online vendor in the market.

EVault Software Agent
The EVault Software Agent software resides on the server(s) that are being protected. The Agent initiates backups based on a set of parameters related to each backup task, which can be a single or multiple files, directories or a full system.

Within EVault Software, a combination of data compression and delta processing technologies reduce the amount of data moving across the network. Standard high-compression techniques are utilized on a per-packet basis as the data is being transmitted.

EVault Software Director
EVault Softwre Director is a server application that authenticates and then accepts data from the Agent and manages that data residing on a storage system. From there, the Director aggregates data from multiple OS platforms, such as Windows, NetWare, Solaris and Red Hat Linux into a CENTRALCONTROLcommon, back-end data pool. This enables data from servers running multiple OS to back up to and restore from this pool. The Director then acts like a web services application and monitors data restore requests from the Agents.

EVault Web CentralControl
The EVault Software Web CentralControl management utility configures and then manages local and/or remote Agents. Web CentralControl defines the parameters for the Agents as to how, what, when, and where to back up. With Web CentralControl, users can easily manage hundreds of backups from computers across a LAN, WAN or public Internet from a single system. Restores can be initiated from either the Agent or Web CentralControl.

EVault DeltaPro™ delta-block processing technology
EVault DeltaPro™ technology provides intelligent extraction and transfer of backup data to a remote storage device. It reduces the amount of data being backed up. Placing far less data in the storage devices means less disk space to be purchased, faster backup times and lower management costs. Leveraging DeltaPro, the Agent scans the server for only new or altered files since the previous backup. Only new or changed data blocks within those files are compressed and encrypted then transmitted to the Director. By processing only new or changed data blocks, combined with compression, the amount of data being backed up can be reduced by up to 98% over traditional file-based backup methods. For example, if the server has 100GB of stored data, then the amount of actual new or changed block-level data in new or changed files is typically 2GB or less. If that data were transmitted over a network with available bandwidth of 1.5MB/second, then the backup window would be less than two hours.

Changes are detected in the blocks by comparing the current block with the previous block in the same position as the image representation from the previous backup. Changed blocks are addressed, compressed, optionally encrypted, and transmitted in order from the first through to the last block in the file. EVault DeltaPro is effective for databases and file systems with hundreds of thousands of files.

Conclusion

IT staffs 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 EVault Data Protection provides businesses with the solution that best fits their needs. By controlling the growth of data being backed up, customers quickly realize 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 EVault Data Protection – will save you time, money and aggravation.

End 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