How disk-to-disk backup saves time and money.

Information technology administrators in small and medium-sized businesses face unrelenting data growth, they work to ensure the availability of important applications such as accounting, document management and email. IT staff must also deal with shrinking windows of time to backup data, and recover quickly from a simple drive failure or a more catastrophic data loss.

Today's IT staffs also now have the added responsibility of adhering to more recent legislation governing the storage and access of electronic records. Laws like Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) and more recently, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are direct results of ensuring the integrity and privacy of electronic records. The GLBA mandates privacy requirements for companies that provide services to the financial services industry. Sarbanes-Oxley, enacted in July 2002 and enforced by the federal Securities and Exchange commission (SEC), creates more corporate oversight and protects shareholders from future Enron and WorldCom-like problems. Among its mandates, Sarbanes specifies how long certain records must be retained and sets penalties for destroying records (physical or electronic).

Heightened awareness around business continuity and regulatory compliance has caused IT administrators to invest in a new or improved data protection and recovery process. Industry analysts, while acknowledging parallels to the Y2K phenomenon, believe that compliance will instead affect businesses of all sizes that collectively need to implement data protection policies that adhere to oncoming regulations or face substantial penalties.

"A key to understanding the impact compliance will have is seeing that it affects all industries [and] affects organizations large and small (the biggest hospitals and the smallest doctors' offices must comply with HIPAA)," said Peter Gerr, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group, in a recent interview with SearchStorage.com. "Compliance regulations already cross the boundaries between our corporate, government and personal lives. Wherever there is information, there will be a compliance regulation close behind to protect the security of or avoid the misuse of those valuable assets."

While meeting compliance or headline-grabbing disasters tend to be credited for increased spending in business continuity, the truth remains that IT staffs must mitigate these difficult, everyday issues if they are going to maintain optimum business continuity.

These issues include:

1. Shrinking backup windows--This is caused by the proliferation of data-intensive, high-availability applications such as Web-based services (email, order processing) and other applications now being required to be available around-the-clock.

2. Fast-growing data volumes--The amount of data being created and stored continues to be staggering. It is reality, not a trend. If the amount of data wasn't growing so quickly, backup windows would not be an issue. These Web-based applications are generally the likely culprits.

3. Lack of central control over distributed systems--IT staff managing backup processes for offsite offices frequently must trust often untrained co-workers to conduct backup activities such as swapping out and replacing tape media. This lack of control and having redundant hardware and software components in multiple offices as opposed to a centralized backup process is cost-prohibitive. Being unable to adequately monitor remote processes also makes it difficult to set up data protection processes required when implementing a business continuity plan.

4. Increasing rate of recovery failure--Every day in every organization, business continuity is jeopardized by viruses, accidental data deletion, and data corruption (hardware or software). Systems grow more complex, increasing the likelihood of failure. Many users and system administrators have not implemented proper backup procedures, and as a result, spend too much time either restoring data or recreating data from scratch.

5. IT department turnover and cost reductions--IT departments are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and achieve more results with static resources. They are also experiencing a higher-than-average rate of turnover compared to other corporate disciplines. This combination of factors creates a difficult situation for IT management, forcing them to seek assistance from tools, utilities or third party services.

6. Human error--At the end of the day, IT staffs need to mitigate human error, the most common cause of data loss within an organization. Whether it's accidentally deleting ah email or file or overfilling a disk drive that caused a server crash, these are daily occurrences, and data protection methods and schemes must take this into account.

As companies consider the data protection portion of its business continuity program, IT staff and their managers with budgetary authority must streamline processes that contribute to human error and challenges just laid forth.

Data stages emerge

Compliance has also brought to light the difference between the backup and archive of data, and the varying characteristics that these data stages typify. Simply put, backup ensures a readily available data copy is available for rapid restore, if necessary. Archive is a long-term retention of data placed on less expensive media. Typically, the information is stored offsite and is held for years if mandated to do so by regulations. If regulations apply, older data is deleted based on company policy and the media is rotated for re-use.

When data access demands were not as high, backup and archive previously were one in the same. However, today data maintains different characteristics as it ages. For example, its corporate importance may be just as high once it ages a year or two, but access requirements may not be quite as high in terms of recall. Subsequently, companies need to evaluate and match the data protection technologies that best suit the needs of the company to access the data.

Traditional data protection suited for today's archive

After 50 years, tape-based storage remains the traditional and most often used method to backup digital information. Diverse organizations use tape as a stable means to ensure they have complete and portable copies of their data. Tape drives, much like magnetic hard drives, have continued to make consistent advancements in access speeds, capacity and smaller footprints.

Tape plays a role important role at the end of a data lifecycle in storing information not requiring frequent access. It would not cause significant problems to the organization if it took several hours or days to restore this type of data. Tape is optimally utilized as a cost-effective way to archive data that still needs to be retained for corporate or regulatory purposes. IT staff can also leverage its portability advantages where they can store archives at a secure, off-site facility.

Disk-to-disk backup approaches

Industry analysts have longed predicted the fall of disk prices as an economic driver to move away from traditional, tape-based backup. However, a more wide-scale convergence of regulatory and economic drivers and technical innovations have made companies consider implementing disk-based, online data protection and recovery solutions.

While traditional backup's merits are rooted in low costs and portability, its downsides do not play well for companies looking to streamline process and deliver must faster recovery of information.

* Backup Speed--Because tape uses a linear recording format it takes more time to write backup data vs. disk. Traditional tape backup strategies including full, incremental and differential methods that require significant bandwidth to meet short backup windows.

* Ability to audit backup--With distributed systems, it is difficult to verify that tapes are properly written to each daily backup.

* Manual intervention for safety-Without manual intervention, backup tapes remain in the tape drive, leaving the data vulnerable to physical events.

* Verification of backup data--Most people do not turn on the option to "verify after write" on their tape drives because this adds 30-50 percent to the time required to complete the backup process.

* 24x7 access to data for recovery--If tapes are removed from the drives to be sent offsite (the recommended method), there is a significant delay in those tapes returning for recovery purposes.

For these reasons, disk-based backup is designed specifically for those companies who require immediate recovery of lost or deleted information yet don't have a lot of time to deal with the processes associated with tape. Beyond its perceived higher cost, disk-based backup has its own barriers to gaining acceptance, however some technology developments have brought viability to the medium as a primary method to protecting data that needs more immediate recovery before migrating to tape-based technology in due time.

Backup Appliances

In the past 12-18 months, storage vendors have introduced backup appliances to the marketplace. These appliances are specifically offer a near-line storage option for companies that have more immediate recovery requirements and may already have a tape-based storage system in place. Backup appliances leverage disk-based backup and recovery speeds and in some cases utilize content-addressed storage (CAS), which instead of employing a centralized index or database to find files, CAS software identifies each file with a content address to directly locate the file.