Modern Backup Infrastructure

I still remember 10 years ago when I was in backup software salesman. We were at this semi-conductor factory somewhere in the Philippines. The partner team and me worked through the night to get the backup software in place for their POC by 6am. The partner team worked with the IT group to put in place one of the first backup to disk solution we ever sold in Asia Pacific. Still remember Cris and Daisy... We completed the first set of backup and the IT manager sat down beside me beside his terminal. He was a skeptic and did not believe in disk backup. I think he was very tired as he looked dazed. Then I started to see beads of perspiration starting to form on his forehead. I knew something was wrong. He accidentally deleted the SAP database file and recovery from tape was not a option as it would take too long. I suggested to him to use the backup set we created and he did.. the rest was history. That was one of the fastest deal we closed...

This is a great story and there are a few important things I learn...

A. You never know when a backup is needed. Most of the time the problem is not a hardware failure but human errors.

B. Recovery always happen at the worst time. When you are minutes from production hours... Somehow Murphy is always part of the team. Recovery is 80% to 90% of the time required from the latest production set and it is needed fast.

C. There is usually no time for recovery. With systems operating 24x7 the amount of time for recovery is very small. With all the modern technologies of snapshots are replication these are often reserved only for the mission critical applications. When IT managers fall back to recover from backups, deduplication technologies which help speed up backup will actually slow down recovery as there is a need to rehydrate backups before they can be recovered.

D. Speed of backup is crucial. Backup needs to be completed within the backup window every night. There is no time for tape stuck or robotic failures from the traditional approach of backing up to tape.

E. You need high compression and deduplication rate so that as much data can be kept on disk as possible. Today every software or hardware backup technology company will claim to offer the highest deduplication rate. As a technologist it is apparent to me that dedicated CPU hardware will push the highest compression rates but arguably some software can do a pretty good job.

F. Replication is a new requirement for backup. Backup is usually part of a DR strategy. Replication or tape-out is usually needed to move data offsite. In some cases branch offices may not have the maturity to administer their own backup, it is important to be replicated to a central primary site.

G. Backup capacity must grow in tandem  with your storage. Most IT department fail to put enough considerations into scaling of backup. The factor of storage growth due to introduction of new services often outstrip that of backup growth capacity. This often cause backup to extend beyond the backup window. Scale-Out and Scale-Up is a interesting trend that storage is adopting to meet unpredictable storage consumption trends. Backup should also be able to match the ability to Scale-Up and Scale-Out to be relevant for the long term.

The backup strategy and recovery strategy is equally important. Choose your strategy carefully and put your requirements in perspective and balance that against your business trends will be a good starting point.

DCIG is a independent evaluator for hardware technologies. A set of free reviews on Deduplicating guide is available on the following site for your review:  http://www.exagrid.com/why-exagrid/industry-analyst-perspectives/

Tan Lee Ann
Area Sales Director, APAC
ExaGrid