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Data Back-Up Terms and Technologies Simplified

At HighPlains DataBank, we understand that not all decision makers are well versed in the latest technological terms with respect to data backup technologies. We have put together the following terms and explanations for the most common backup alternatives, including our databank concept.

Tape: Disk to tape vaulting for backup and a disaster recovery component

Disk to Disk to Online: Onsite Disk to Disk backup, with online backup for a disaster recovery component.

Disk to Disk to Tape: Onsite Disk to Disk backup, with tape vaulting for a disaster recovery component.

Operational Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is defined as the acceptable limit of how far back in time you have to go before the required data is found, i.e. the most recently saved copy that is still available. Most tape and asynchronous online backup strategies usually have a nightly backup component and therefore, have a restore point of one or two days. On site, disk based strategies working with continuous data protection software can have Recovery Points of minutes or even seconds.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is defined as the acceptable limit of how long it takes to recover from data loss. Trickling a large amount of data back from a data center over an internet connection can take days or even weeks, depending on connection speed and data quantity. If the connection is severed or intermittent, backup RPOs and restore RTOs can be compromised. Rebuilding a server from tape and then restoring all the data from tape is a time intensive proposition that industry analysts agree provides 50% to 70% success rate. Recovery times with tape range from days to weeks. A local disk based copy is the fastest and most reliable medium to backup to and restore from, when protecting against operational threats.

Disaster RPO/RTO: Disaster data loss is caused by natural (and man-made) disasters such as fire, flood, theft, vandalism, and building collapse. These include small disasters like a small fire in the sever room or inadvertent sprinkler system activation to major disasters like Katrina, 9/11, mudslides, wildfires, widespread flooding, rioting, pandemic outbreak, etc. All these types of disasters account for 2% to 5% of data loss. Typically data loss in these situations is catastrophic. Statistics show that 79% of businesses that permanently lose access to all of their data are forced to close within 2 years time.

Ease of Use/Human Risk
This category is an important metric when considering the potential for data loss due to human error. Reliability of data recovery is greatly reduced each time a human is required to actively participate in the backup strategy. Tape backup requires extensive human interaction with swapping tapes, testing tapes, logging the swaps and tests, cleaning tape drives, and vaulting the tapes offsite or in a media safe. Obviously, this should score low on the human risk scale. If you employ expensive autoloaders and vaulting services, the risk goes down but only as costs rise drastically. Online strategies involve humans in the setup and occasional maintenance, but do not require humans to do anything on a regular basis.

Ease of Compliance
If your organization is under federal, state, or local regulations, most likely you are required to ensure your data systems are compliant from both a security and disaster protection perspective.

When considering security, tape or data archiving should be locked in a safe area. As opposed to tape or online solutions, the physical control of the data can be easily demonstrated - it's simply locked in the server room!

Compliance requirements may or may not require your business to have a disaster plan. According to research by the University of Texas, 94% companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss close within 2 years. Good business practice demands that your critical business data be protected against disaster.

Tape and online solutions will almost always result in complicated processes that burden your business and reduce productivity. Testing, logging, security and controls all add to increased costs as complexity is increased.

Wide Area Network (WAN) Congestion
Tape strategies usually do not create Wide Area Network (WAN) congestion or cause internet users to lose bandwidth. Depending on configuration, online strategies can create an immense amount of WAN congestion or very little at all during working hours. Analysts estimate that data requirements are compounding at 120% per year. Since internet speeds are not increasing at this rate, and backup windows are already starting to encroach on working hours, the online backup strategy is becoming useful for only very large companies who can afford synchronous hot sites that mirror to multiple locations in real time. For the average company with a single location or a maxed out internet connection, the online backup strategy is causing more and more WAN congestion.

Archival Ability/Scalability
Tape is one of the best proven tools for archival. If there are hundreds of Terabytes to move around and archive, a truck load of tapes is hard to beat. Online strategies are very limited in archive and scalability, due to high speed connectivity costs and the cost per GB charged by data centers. As data throughput requirements grow, the monthly cost of connection can rapidly get into the thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Data centers typically charge per GB or TB of space used in the past month. The first month of service is the least expensive, but as you aggregate more and more data at the data center, the costs also go up dramatically. As an example, a well known online data storage service charges $20/ GB/ month. If a company aggregates 1GB of data per day the first month will cost $433. If no data is archived and is always available online, the 36th month will cost $26,000.

Remote Administrators/Restore
Any disk based strategy, configured properly, will provide network administrators the ability to remotely administer and confirm data backup routines. Remote server restore and rebuild is also a possibility with onsite disk based backup strategies in an operational data loss situation. To a lesser degree, online backup strategies can employ remote administration to verify that backups have taken place and to perform some maintenance. Online strategies have a more difficult time with bare metal server restore, simply due to the large amounts of data that need to be transferred across a slow internet connection in a short period of time. The simple truth here is if you require the ability to remotely administer and restore one server or a network of many servers across a wide geographic distribution, on site disk based backup is the only viable option for the great majority of businesses.

High Plains DataBank
Our solution centers on a storage consolidation strategy. By operating at the storage level, instead of at the server or application level, we ensure protection while offloading tasks from busy servers and in turn replicate your critical data to our co-location facility. All our solutions operate with simple and consistent interfaces and are guaranteed to work together. We rationalize your disaster recovery and business continuance strategy and help you simplify data management. We greatly improve your recovery times and reduce expensive downtime, protecting you against lost revenue and damaged reputation. The simplicity of our solutions produces significant cost savings in the deployment and ongoing operation of your disaster recovery and business continuance strategy.  This allows you to achieve your business goals, while protecting your critical data from planned and/or unplanned events.  The following diagram illustrates this idea:

All our solutions are based on NetApp technology.  NetApp has built a comprehensive solution for solving numerous disaster recovery and business continuance challenges. The NetApp offering is differentiated by providing simple-to-use, feature-rich, highly reliable products enhanced by High Plains DataBank services. The solution improves recovery time and lowers your management costs.

As shown in the illustration, our co-location site could also fulfill an additional role as a business continuance facility in the event of a catastrophic customer site/system failure due to power outage, equipment failure, severe weather conditions, building damage, etc. Application data, such as email, is instantaneously available from a secondary server with the use of VMware. Files and applications need only to be restored.  Moreover, all tape backups would occur at the offsite facility instead of the customer site, reducing costs as well as simplifying and centralizing backup management if you require it.

There are several options in which to choose from.  The following are typical examples.

a.    If you are an existing NetApp customer, you can purchase additional shelves of disk to reside at our co-location facility.  This option allows you to physically remove your data assets in the event of a contract termination.  Basically, you will be leasing processing power and management.

b.   If you are an existing NetApp customer, you can also lease storage space from our co-location facility if you do not want to purchase storage.  You cannot remove the disk assets, but can pay for data migration services for DR and BC.  Basically, you would be leasing processing power, management and storage space.

c.    If you are not a NetApp customer, High Plains DataBank can provide you with a storage system for your primary site.  Essentially, you will lease the equipment while we manage your data at both the primary and co-location sites.

Any of these options will require you to purchase NetApp’s SnapMirror/SnapVault Primary licenses for your specific system.  The requirement for encrypted data will not include the purchase of a encryption device. Instead, this equipment can be provided by High Plains DataBank if necessary. Moreover, if you require tape backups, you will need to purchase the LTO-3 media.  All of these costs can be rolled into a single operational lease to meet the your budget.

NetApp has built a comprehensive solution for solving numerous disaster recovery challenges. The NetApp offering is differentiated by providing simple-to-use, feature-rich, highly reliable products enhanced by High Plains DataBank services. The solution improves recovery time and lowers acquisition and management costs. The complete NetApp disaster recovery family of products includes the following hardware and software products:

• Fabric Attached Storage (FAS): A scalable suite of highly available, field-proven networked storage systems, NetApp enterprise storage systems are easy to install, configure, and manage and deliver one of the lowest total costs of ownership and highest returns on investment in the industry.

• Virtual Tape Library storage systems: A highly optimized disk storage system capable of emulating tape libraries. The operating system and data layout is highly tuned to meet the high sustained rate and larger block sizes of tape backup, versus high I/O small read/write capabilities of standard disk systems used for disk based backup.  NetApp VTL storage systems work in concert with a tape library to address performance inherent in direct backup to tape.

• Snapshot™ technology: Enables near-instantaneous, transparent, online backup of customer data by storing multiple read-only versions of each data volume. Snapshot requires minimal disk space and causes no disruption of service.

• Clustered Failover: Ensures data availability by transferring the data service of an unavailable system to another system in the cluster. Often, the transfer is transparent to end users and applications, and the data service is quickly and automatically resumed, with no visible interruption to business operations.

•  SnapMirror: Policy-based, remote-replication software for NetApp storage that shortens backup windows and reduces network traffic by transferring only changed blocks of data.

• SyncMirror™: Software for synchronous data replication for maximum data availability.

•  MultiStore™: Software solution that enables secure, multiprotocol storage and multiple domain (Windows® and UNIX) consolidation across enterprises. It enables you to partition the networking and storage resources of a single NetApp storage system for simplification of storage consolidation.

• DataFabric® Manager (DFM) Business Continuance Module: Simplifies data administration by efficiently managing a storage infrastructure consisting of NetApp enterprise storage systems and NearStore® storage systems. The Business Continuance Module of DFM software allows for SnapMirror relationships in order to help ensure data availability.

• Virtual File Manager™: Software for enterprise-level storage management for Windows environments.

•  MetroCluster: NetApp software that combines failover capability and synchronous data replication to ensure you can recover from disaster—with no loss of data—in minutes rather than hours or days.