Backup solutions for today s Data Center

Transcription

1 Backup solutions for today s Data Center

2 If your job involved storage data, you already know storage eats up budget dollars fast! In this eguide learn the different data and storage systems available, and which ones will really eat up your storage budget. By: Jeff Boles, Contributor Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process. If your job involves storing data, you already know storage eats up budget dollars faster than just about anything else in IT. But as daily practitioners, we rarely notice just how many bucks storage is truly consuming. The marketing hype for data storage products stays focused on magic bullets like more capacity per dollar or more I/O per dollar, but the is about more than that. One of the best ways to consider the true is to think about what s required to store a single piece of data over its entire lifetime. This is called the lifecycle cost of data storage, and it includes the technologies, processes and workflows across all types of storage. This type of bottom-up look at storing a piece of data over a period of time not only helps us understand what data storage truly costs, but helps us determine what we should be looking for when we re shopping for data storage products. The classic challenge for the strategic storage manager is that the vast majority of data created in the data center starts its life on primary storage, so storage purchasers tend to fixate on these costs. But capital costs are actually more of a distraction than a real representation of what storage costs. Even worse, the costs are even more skewed when you consider the dissimilar products that are typically part of most storage environments. Even the total costs of primary data storage are often misunderstood. Primary Page 2 of 8

3 storage is often poorly provisioned and underutilized, a problem that s compounded as more storage systems are added and more features are licensed (you may need additional replication or copy functionality with multiple systems installed). And you re bound to see at least a linear increase in the time and effort required to manage the storage, especially when timeconsuming tasks like data migrations are required. But the cost of storing data goes beyond just primary storage. Each piece of stored data is surrounded by an ecosystem of information services. Data protection is the most obvious, and it typically consists of several parts such as the of multiple disk and tape tiers, and the logistics of getting protected data offsite. A holistic look at the cost of data protection alone is likely to dwarf the capital costs of primary storage systems. There are plenty of other costs besides data protection. Regulatory compliance and the changing nature of intellectual property encourage everlonger retention of data. To hold onto more data for longer periods of time, companies must spin up entire infrastructures and establish practices around information archiving, search and retrieval. Disaster recovery is yet another data protection function that can t be ignored, and its cost can be significant. The replication engines, bandwidth consumption and duplicate storage infrastructure required for disaster protection can easily induce some serious sticker shock. Taneja Group has done extensive benchmark testing of hypervisors for what we refer to as virtual machine (VM) density; it s based on the idea that different hypervisors are more or less efficient, so that given matching hardware, some will be able to run more VMs or deliver better performance. When considering all the hardware, licensing, effort and consumption of data center resources, this can have an enormous bottomline impact. Recently, we ve also focused on storage density, which is a similar concept. It considers how a product or technology can help you shrink your data footprint when considered across storage capacity, storage systems, bandwidth consumption and human interaction. Page 3 of 8

4 It s not really a new idea; rather, we re just now starting to see solutions that attempt to bring together capabilities that used to come from many separate storage products. In part, it s also a reaction to changing IT practices in the enterprise; with virtualization becoming mainstream, data protection practices have had to change, and it s not uncommon to see primary storage products that incorporate some aspect of data protection. Similarly, data storage products are featuring better optimization, and secondary storage systems are raising performance and becoming more general purpose. A number of vendors try to communicate this message in terms of storage efficiency. But storage efficiency often implies a sort of soft, qualitative comparison, and it can fool users into thinking that improving storage might just be about tweaking one or two of the most obvious dimensions of efficiency, such as capacity optimization. Whether we call it storage density or storage efficiency, it s more than a single dimension. We ve explored various examples of this functional convergence creating greater storage density in recent lab exercises. I see those exercises as representing the market as a whole; each vendor in this consolidating, scaling-storage landscape is striving to enhance the value and competitiveness of their offerings. But the real winners are users, who are finally getting storage technologies that can help enterprises scale their storage infrastructures through better storage density rather than sprawl. tape and disk-based By: Brien M. Posey What you will learn in this tip: Rather than switching from a tape to a disk-based system, why not use a mixture and get the best of both worlds? Learn about the pros and cons of this approach in this data tip. There's no denying that disk-based s are all the rage in the past few years, but tape-based s are still alive and well. As such, organizations Page 4 of 8

5 may find themselves choosing between disk- and tape-based s. Rather than choosing, however, it may be more advantageous to use a mixture of the two technologies. To give you a better idea of what I mean, take a look at the chart below "A comparison of tape and disk." It compares tape and disk s in several key areas: A comparison of tape and disk Portability Capacity Speed Availability Reliability Administrative burden Disk Not usually portable, although it is possible to store s off-site by backing up to a remote SAN, a cloud application or using RDX removable disk technology. Finite (This is generally only true for a SAN. Every storage array has a maximum [finite] capacity, even if that capacity has not yet been reached.) Very fast because disks support random access. Most recent s are available. Generally reliable, but a single disk error can render an entire series of s useless because many disk-based applications perform block-level incremental s. Multiple versions of files are usually retained online, and users may be able to restore their own files. Tape Portable. Each tape has a finite capacity, but s can span multiple tapes. Somewhat slower than disk due to the linear nature of tapes. A tape must be loaded before its data can be restored. This can be problematic if the tape is stored off-site. Tapes are more reliable than they once were, but are still vulnerable to demagnetizing and to being "eaten" by tape drives. A user must typically submit a help desk request and then wait for an administrator to restore the. Page 5 of 8

6 Backup frequency Backup window Many disk-based solutions perform s on a continuous basis throughout the day, ensuring that the latest data is always backed up. If the disk-based supports continuous data protection (CDP), then the window is not an issue. Tape-based typically occurs late at night. There is a large potential for data loss if a failure occurs before the has had a chance to run. The window may not be an issue for any resources that support Volume Shadow Copy (or other snapshot technology) s, but resources that do not support VSS must be backed up within the allotted window. So how can you get the best of both worlds? The key is to decide what types of s are best suited to tape, and which s would benefit more from disk. strategies: Static and dynamic data Obviously, every organization has its own unique needs, but generally speaking you should base your data strategy on whether the data that is being backed up tends to be static or dynamic. Diskbased s are best suited to data that is rapidly changing, but the volume used to store those s tends to have a limited amount of space. Therefore, if you know that you have certain data that is never going to change then you can free up some space on your disk s by writing the static data to tape. This leads me to another point. Some organizations use tape s to provide a safeguard for disk-based s. We all know that disks can go bad, or can become corrupted. That is the main reason why we create s in the first place. So what is stopping the disks in your disk-based server from failing? Absolutely nothing. Page 6 of 8

7 Some people assume that if the storage array used by a disk-based application fails, then nothing has really been lost. After all, the production servers have not failed, and all of the data still exists. In reality, however, a failure is a big deal. For one thing, the failure leaves you with no s until you can get the problem fixed. The other problem is that your historical s are lost. Suppose, for example, that a user asks you to restore a file from last Thursday. The file server is still functioning, and the file still exists, but because the s are gone there is no way to revert to a previous version of the file. One way around this problem is to back up the server. Although you can perform disk-to-disk-to-disk s, many administrators prefer to perform disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) s. That way, the server has been backed up to removable media. This allows for the creation of s that can be shipped off-site, and they won't be damaged along with the disk-based s if the facility were to be hit by lightning. Both disk and tape are viable mediums. Since both mediums have their own strengths and weaknesses, you can create a more robust architecture by combining the two mediums. About the author: Brien M. Posey, MCSE, has previously received Microsoft's MVP award for Exchange Server, Windows Server and Internet Information Server (IIS). Brien has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and was once responsible for the Department of Information Management at Fort Knox. You can visit Brien's personal website at Page 7 of 8

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