Data has changed. There is more of it, it’s larger and is no longer all located on a single storage device in the middle of the data center. As a result backup, an already challenging process, is now reaching the breaking point. Just one example of how this is manifesting itself is that some application owners and users no longer trust their data to IT. They’re taking matters into their own hands by using application backup or point backup utilities, which actually makes managing the backup process even more difficult. Data protection must change with this new reality so that user confidence can be restored and IT can adequately protect corporate assets.
Continue To Protect The Business Core
While much of the focus of data protection has shifted to protecting the virtual environment, big data, mobile user data and remote offices, IT can’t forget to protect the heart of the data center, applications like Oracle, SQL and Exchange. It’s true that most of the data growth has exploded in those new areas, but the data inside of back office applications has also continued to increase in importance.
While the data that these applications create and store is generally located in a single location the access to that data is now more widespread than ever. Customers are accessing data through the web and through mobile apps. Internal users are accessing data directly from a variety of devices. In these environments today, the expectation is for 24×7 access from virtually any device the user chooses.
Much of the focus for back office applications has been on high availability and return-to-operation windows, but the data that these applications create and store needs to be cataloged, versioned and archived just like any other form of data. Leveraging policy based protection to optimize and compliment the HA functions will help lower overall costs while increasing data granularity.
It is also important that these applications, as well as newer projects like virtualization and big data, leverage tape as a compliment to disk. While many of the latest point-solutions in backup have forgone tape, tape still has an important role to play in the backup process. When properly leveraged tape can lower the investment in a disk backup infrastructure and increase data retention times when appropriate.
Protect The Next Generation – The Virtual Environment
While the core of the data center is certainly important, much of that core is now moving to the virtualized environment. For a variety of reasons these environments tend to be on their own storage systems but the data protection process should not treat these systems like a bunch of standalone physical servers. Nor should the data protection process be managed separate from the rest of the data protection processes in the environment.
An important requirement for any virtual environment backup discussion is how the data protection process will deal with the dynamic nature that it brings. Not only is the data distributed in these environments so is the actual server that’s being protected. Also, since creation of a virtual server is far easier and less costly than a physical one, virtual machines can appear on the network and start running production applications without the backup manager ever knowing about them. The backup process needs to automatically detect virtual machines when created and continue to protect them when they move.
As virtual environments move from a test phase to “virtual first” initiatives the quantity of virtual machines and the storage capacities that they consume are increasing. For these reasons ‘off-virtual machine’ backup is a necessity. The VMs need to be protected without placing an undue load on each and every one of them. Off-VM backup also eases the management burden by allowing the focus on backing up at the hypervisor layer, not each individual virtual machine.
Another important trend in the virtual environment is the increasing density of virtual machines. Density is being enabled by the generational improvement in processing power being provided by x86 servers. The denser the VM to host ration the better the Virtual Server ROI becomes. A key roadblock when trying to increase VM density is data protection. Off-VM protection and high levels of automation when implemented correctly will remove these roadblocks.
Enterprise to Remote Office, Branch Office
Both desktop and server virtualization, as well as the continued increase in back office applications, have made data protection at the primary data center more critical than ever. Due to this consolidation of server and desktop data, the importance of protecting data at the central site is more important than ever.
These consolidation efforts while lowering operational costs do present an “all your eggs in one basket” scenario. They also bring the expectation from users that IT is much more responsible for data at these remote offices, branch offices. This means that making sure data is available from a disaster recovery perspective is that much more important.
While HA and cluster processes protect the applications that can’t afford down time, the bulk of the servers (virtual and physical) will have to be recovered. Making sure that data is in place and accessible is an important requirement for modern enterprise applications. This includes leveraging deduplication to replicate hot backup data to the DR data center and even leveraging tape for cold, off-site data movement to protect against events that HA doesn’t cover such as corruption, virus, site wide disaster, etc.
At the same time though users are more mobile than ever and now carry more unique copies of corporate data than in the past. It is important that these mobile data sets are backed up. The backup manager can no longer wait until the user returns to home base for a backup to occur. Data has to be protected while they’re on the move. This means dealing with sub-par bandwidth common in broadband or hotel WiFi.
Also, as is the case with back office application access, these users want to get at their data from any type of device they have at hand, either a smartphone or tablet. If IT does not address this core need, users will be left to find their own solutions. The result can be the introduction of the public cloud into the organization, which can jeopardize corporate assets and make the overall data protection process even more complicated. IT is better served by providing this service to their users and the backup process is an ideal way to accomplish that task.
In between these two extremes are branch offices, which also generate data and need to be part of the data protection process. It is unlikely that an IT staffer would be at these locations so, similar to remote laptop backups, these branch offices need silent, automated backup solutions. But these solutions have a different requirement than mobile laptop users, their data sets are larger and the impact of data loss is more widespread. These branch locations need a local device that can keep a large amount of backup data in the branch but still replicate that data to the primary data center.
Leveraging The Cloud For All It’s Worth
Another way to combat this distribution of data is to leverage cloud storage for all it is worth. The cloud is an ideal consolidation point for all of these dispersed data storage locations. It’s easily accessible and typically well protected in its own right. The cloud should be seen as a compliment to enterprise data protection not a replacement for it and can be leveraged as a disaster recovery solution in data centers of all sizes.
There is also a Total Cost of Ownership advantage when the cloud is used for DR data copies. Full capacity does not have to be purchased up front since the cloud scales granularly as data grows internally. It also means that every primary storage system upgrade doesn’t have to result in a 2X storage capacity purchase for the backup process (capacity for the on-premise copy and the off-site copy).
Transform Backup Data To A Valuable Business Asset
Finally, enterprise backup needs to evolve from a simple insurance policy into a valuable business asset for the enterprise. The backup process, when properly implemented, has one advantage over every other process; it has all the data in the company, whether that data is in the primary data center, a branch office or on remote laptops. With this consolidation backup is the ideal point from which to do data mining, to establish and maintain compliance and to service legal discovery requests. All that’s needed is the right overlay of indexing and search capabilities and every data object, regardless of location, can be accessed for these functions.
In the coming articles in this series Storage Switzerland will detail each of these new or enhanced roles for enterprise backup and discuss how products like those from HP Autonomy can enable enterprise data protection to do much more than simply provide backup. In addition to performing this core mission of protecting the organization’s digital assets, we will detail how the data protection process can be transformed into one that adds significant value to the business.
HP is a client of Storage Switzerland
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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