Data Management : backup, Business Continuity

Finding Value in Business Outcomes

Michael Crest — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:33:00 GMT

The cloud file-sharing service Dropbox is immensely popular among consumer and enterprise users – and not because it’s free.

Despite its insecurities, Dropbox is a favorite among 200 million users because it does what it advertises, and it does it well. It’s simple, drag-and-drop functionality makes moving files between users and devices a snap. And, in some regards, it provides data protection against loss and corruption.

Dropbox isn’t the system most enterprises would typically choose. It doesn’t have the management features, account administration controls, reporting mechanisms or security most enterprises desire. It doesn’t have “feature creep” (the continual addition of features and functions), and it doesn’t need them.

Now, I’m not advocating Dropbox as an enterprise solution. But it is a good example of how simple, straightforward IT products and services often have more enterprise value because they do what they’re designed to do with ease.

Enterprise expectations are changing for what technology is supposed to deliver. Notions that IT is about automation and cost savings are evaporating in the heat of need for growth in productivity, revenue and profits.

In other words, enterprises want technology that results in better outcomes.

IT decision-makers are fatigued by the features wars – the escalation of new functions, interface improvements and reporting mechanisms that may improve the look and feel of an application/system, but do little to effectuate net-gain outcomes.

For years, the technology industry has used the features wars to entice customers into upgrading applications and migrating to new platforms. The process worked: Incremental improvements were enough to justify spending. However, enterprises have caught on that these feature wars mean they’re paying for features they rarely or never use.

Instead of new features, enterprises want applications and systems that produce better results, regardless of the underlying interface or discrete feature options. We see this today in backup and data protection systems. The market is flooded with cloud, hybrid and on-premises products differentiated by interface features rather than those that solve real problems, such as recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

Think about backup for a moment. Cool reporting functions and a slick user interface are good, but they aren’t the same as having assurances that RTO and RPO are absolutely achievable. After all, data integrity and availability are paramount to normal business operations and continuity.

The same thing can be said in virtualization. With nearly 60 percent of the server install base virtualized, we’re fast approaching the point where the benefits of this technology are shifting from machine consolidation to operational performance. To the enterprise, performance and outcome are about how well a virtualized environment is backed up, is replicated and fails over. However, many of the tools available in market promote add-ons that don’t always have definable value.

As Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” believes outcomes still matter. Rather than focusing on what goes into the technology, vendors and solution providers should help their customers achieve higher levels of performance and results. Or, as he succinctly says, “We must always start with the end in mind.”

Making things simple and valuable isn’t easy – but making things easier, allowing for technical agility based on business objectives, increasing value and reducing operational costs are more valuable to an enterprise than a new blinking light or colorful dashboard.

Too often, we get caught up in the features rather than the goal. When the dust settles on the current or next hype cycle, we all need to be mindful that we serve one purpose: organizational outcomes.

- Reprinted with permission of The 2112 Group -

Thinking About Much More than Backup on World Backup Day

Bennett Klein — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:25:00 GMT

While we are all preparing for World Backup Day on March 31, I’d like to suggest we need to do far more than just back up.

We’re coming off a tumultuous season where Sandy took out the Northeast in just a few days and blizzard snow conditions repeatedly disrupted the Midwest and New England. Now we’re heading into hurricane and tornado season in the South and West, and we always face the uncertainty of fire, flood and even more catastrophic events. Even simple theft of IT resources could bring a company to its knees overnight.

For decades, IT staff has relied on backup software for data protection and recovery. But as recent events demonstrate, business demands for faster recovery and less risk of data loss require IT to perform far more than just simple backups.

While backup remains the core of data protection strategies, using complementary technologies like Bare Metal Recovery (BMR), Virtual Standby, Replication and Host-based High Availability can make the difference between employees twiddling their thumbs for hours waiting for systems to be restored, and getting back to work in minutes to avoid disruptions in sales, service, operations and customer satisfaction. Using these technologies in conjunction with remote facilities like a remote datacenter or office, a MSP hosting site, or even a public cloud can provide a real disaster recovery and business continuity solution that could mean the difference between staying in business and going out of business when a disaster like Sandy strikes.

Ask yourself, is basic backup and recovery really going to meet your business needs and goals when unplanned outages and data loss occur? You can avoid or at least reduce the cost and impact of business downtime by planning better and adopting cost-effective technologies. Solutions like CA ARCserve® deliver all these technologies together in a single solution that protects your physical and virtual systems, applications and data across your business. Start planning today.

Why Complicate Things More?

Greg LaMonica — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:47:00 GMT

Over the past few years, we have seen virtualization use cases expand from the edge of the network infrastructure, mostly in development and Q/A circles, to being front and center as a critical business tool providing consolidation of resources and significant cost savings. (A recent 2013 report by JP Morgan estimated that upwards of 60% of all x86 workloads are now virtualized.) When new technologies hit the market that solve significant business problems, regardless of the size of the business, that technology tends to spawn additional markets in support of it to expand or manage its added functionality.

This is exactly what we are seeing with virtualization, offshoot markets offering with everything from the management of virtual environments to competing hypervisors to solutions to protect the data inside of the virtual machines. Let’s focus on the protection of these virtual environments for now.

Very few environments are 100% virtualized and there are zero signs of this trend changing much in the coming years. Put a different way, the majority of the world has applications and data that are crucial to the business residing on both physical and virtual machines. Data protection vendors have spent the last decade listening to frustrated administrators talk about how complicated it is to backup and protect their environments and how it doesn’t need to be that way.

At CA Technologies, we agree. You should be able to manage the protection of your virtual and physical environments from a single solution. Why create confusion, introduce additional levels of complexity and added costs by having dedicated data protection solutions for your virtual and physical environments? If your backup and data protection solutions can’t protect both your physical and your virtual environments, our advice is you need to find a different solution. Businesses cannot afford to be down while determining what application is protecting what data and where it resides, etc. You need solutions that protect your entire IT infrastructure, whether physical or virtual, with similar levels of protection to meet the demands of your business – even if that business demands long-term storage of that virtual data to tape.

Click here for more information on cutting through the complication.

Rethinking Backup in a Multifaceted World

Michael Crest — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:49:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when backup was essentially a one-to-one exercise. In smaller shops, an administrator would plug a tape into the reader and the server data would get copied – usually overnight. In large data centers, servers and endpoints would back up to tape libraries with essentially the same architecture, just with far more automation and efficiency.

Today’s IT infrastructure is about virtualization. If it could be virtualized, chances are it was. In fact, analyst firm 451 Research reports that 51 percent of all x86 servers were virtualized in 2012, and server virtualization continues growing at an annual rate of 13 percent. In practical terms, businesses are getting far greater server utilization rates than with conventional servers, and they’re using fewer physical machines because they’re able to get greater virtual machine (VM) densities on their host machines. But, each VM looks and acts like a standalone server and therefore requires coordinated backup.

Of course, virtual densities are one issue. Virtual sprawl is another due to the sheer volume of VMs being created – where are they, what server do they reside on, are the VMs still critical and need to be backed up, etc.

But let’s not get comfortable with the notion that the new paradigm is simply one of virtualization. Further complicating the backup challenges is the growing use of cloud-based resources for applications and data.

Regardless of the proliferation of the cloud and virtualization, businesses will likely retain a certain level of conventional, physical infrastructure that falls into the traditional backup solution set. So we’re faced with layers of complexity that show no signs of disappearing. As a result, we often have to cobble together solutions that fit the unique requirements of virtual, physical and cloud in favor of legacy solutions covering all environments. .

There is a better way.

The key to protecting virtualized environments is tight integration with the virtualization system. You have to think differently, because there are different types of files, which pose their own challenges. It isn’t a simply a matter of copying the files.

The punch line: If you have a virtual infrastructure, which I’m betting you do, there’s a compelling reason to invest in a virtualization-aware backup and recovery solution because traditional physical environment backup solutions are limited in terms of their ability to protect virtual environments.

Yet as virtualization continues to grow in importance, the demands of the business continue to increase as well – and these demands don’t stop at just a backup and recovery solution for virtualized environments. Organizations require physical backup and recovery as well as the protection of their virtual environments– all while evolving to the cloud. Backup solutions need to span the physical, virtual and cloud resources where data resides.

Finally, recovery-point objectives (RPO) and recovery-time objectives (RTO) are under pressure from the business to minimize downtime. Delivering on the promise of true continuous data protection and high availability is critical across physical, virtual and cloud environments. That promise is faced with the headwinds of de-layering and rationalizing the portfolio of backup and recovery solutions and is equally critical to an organization’s ability to scale.

Solution providers can continue to piece together disparate systems with duct tape and bailing wire if they like. Chances are such systems will become less efficient and more costly. Worse, they will have a higher probability of failure in the event of a disaster.

Instead, solution providers should look for integrated, reliable, easy-to-use and scalable solutions, so that when disasters happen, they aren’t navigating multiple solutions from multiple vendors with varying administrative requirements and expertise. For the sake of your data-dependent customers, solution providers should look deeper, demand more and expect a greater level of capability from their data protection solution.

- Reprinted with permission of The 2112 Group -

Eliminating the Data Protection Headaches

Greg LaMonica — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:56:00 GMT

Building on my last post, now that you know what you need to protect, you can start the discovery process and determine how to move forward. Of course, you could offload your data protection requirements to a Managed Service Provider (MSP), an increasingly popular option today, but it is still your responsibility to ensure you are making the right data protection solution or service choice.

Most tools today can protect or back up relevant information. The key to your entire strategy is being able to quickly or simply recover that information, helping to reduce your stress and save costs. You’ll achieve cost savings by spending less time attempting recovery, and ensuring you’re not storing irrelevant data which ties up tapes and disk space.

Once you have a good handle on what needs to be protected, there are other factors you have to consider – for example, the network bandwidth, which has a direct impact on backup and recovery methods. Does the data protection solution have network throttling? Can the backup or restore jobs be staggered or integrated with other backup solutions? How does it impact the performance of the system? How about ease of use? Can you use Data Deduplication, Replication/Full System High Availability and Infinite Incremental Backups?

If your data protection solution can address these questions, then you’re ready to determine the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for the data to be protected. Most data protection solutions can perform the backup or protect the data by storing it at the local location, and transferring the data back to a central server located at the host site during off-peak hours. This enables you to have a hybrid data protection approach where a user can quickly recover lost data on his/her computer because it was backed up locally on that laptop, desktop or application server – having no impact on the network and IT staff.

That’s why I mentioned ease-of-use earlier. There may be situations where the IT staff or MSP at the central site may have to perform the recovery job due to local file corruption or user error. But at minimum, you can start to feel better as you are now protecting your infrastructure.

Another thing to consider is that most remote data protection solutions integrate directly into another host backup solution, creating an additional level of data protection. Any data protection strategy should include staging the data locally to disk at the host site based on a time or a data storage threshold. This can be achieved by image-level backups or even leveraging a data replication/high availability capability.

As we know, restoring from tape is a slower process and staging or replicating the data to disk would maintain another level of data protection, providing the ability to meet the defined RTO and RPO, as the data will be restored from the host site from disk when possible. Storing data on disk may seem like you could incur some additional costs, but if you are only protecting business-critical data by staging your backups, you will reduce costs by eliminating tapes, network overhead, downtime and headaches.

And isn’t eliminating headaches what we all really want?

For more information, check out this white paper on simplifying data protection.