Technology Brief EMC Can Give Organizations More Than One Way to Do D2D2C Date: March 2014 Authors: Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst; and Monya Keane, Research Analyst Abstract: Some organizations need a bit of a nudge to drive them to think beyond disk-only data protection toward deploying a more hybridized data protection approach. Hybrid data protection usually encompasses disk, plus tape, plus the cloud, but it doesn t have to include all three of those elements. EMC promotes a multifaceted version of hybrid data protection centered on disk plus cloud. It s a legitimate architecture for IT organizations to consider. Overview: Choosing a Data Protection Strategy Data protection isn t synonymous with backup. Rather, a good data protection strategy looks a lot like a spectrum of activities and goals with the best strategies including most or all of the spectrum s colors (see Figure 1). Figure 1. The Spectrum of Data Protection Even strictly in regard to backup, options abound: Backup to disk, backup to tape, and backup to cloud are distinctive, separate ways to get that job done. Recently, disk-plus-cloud configurations have attracted IT pros attention. Copying data from a production array or server to an onsite intermediary backup appliance, and then replicating that data again to an offsite cloud repository for backup is referred to as a disk-to-disk-to-cloud approach D2D2C for short. Some IT organizations do try engaging a BaaS provider and going straight to the cloud for backup (omitting the intermediary onsite disk-based backup appliance). But backing up directly to the cloud more importantly, restoring data directly from the cloud can take too long. That s why most organizations find that the wiser course is to deploy that intermediary onsite disk appliance as a first responder of sorts a fast tier of recovery allowing them to meet their predefined return-to-uptime SLAs following an outage or scheduled disruption. Going to the Cloud Doesn t Make Preexisting RTO and RPO Commitments Disappear Some environments have the budget and infrastructure necessary to push and pull data across a long-distance wire very fast. But that s a bit of a luxury. Most IT organizations would be hard pressed to do a significant recovery or major bulk restore solely over the Internet at the same speed that an onsite architecture provides. As Figure 2 shows, while one would expect high priority applications to have very little tolerance (half requiring less than 15 minutes, while 83% expect less than three hours) even normal workloads have high
Technology Brief: EMC Can Give Organizations More Than One Way to Do D2D2C 2 expectations, with nearly a fourth (23%) requiring the same less than 15 minute outage and 62% expecting less than three hours. 1 Figure 2. Downtime Tolerance for High Priority Applications and Normal Workloads What are your organization s RTOs for high priority applications and normal production workloads? (Percent of respondents, N=325) High priority applications Normal production workloads 30% 2 20% 1 10% 2 10% 24% 13% 20% 16% 19% 18% 1 7% 18% 6% 0% No ever Up to 15 minutes of Less than 1 hour of 1 hour to less than 3 3 hours to less than hours of 10 hours of 10 hours to 24 hours of Don t know Similarly, only one third of respondents (albeit from a very small sampling) reported always recovering their cloud-based data as quickly as they needed to (see Figure 3). 2 IT organizations are being reminded that just because they ve gone to the cloud, they aren t absolved of the RPO and RTO commitments their customers and end-users demand. Figure 3. Cloud Data Protection: RTO Objectives Aren t Always Being Met In those cases that your organization has had to recover data, were your recovery time objectives (RTOs) met successfully? (Percent of respondents, N=21) Sometimes, 10% Never, Don t know, Always, 33% Most of the time, 48% The findings remind us that the cloud is just a delivery vehicle that doesn t change the rules of what IT organizations must deliver. Exceptions exist not all organizations have a hard time meeting a reasonable SLA directly from the cloud, and niche technologies are available to offer help in the form of ultra-efficient compression, deduplication, reverse block recovery, etc. But in general, most tech and most organizations will need that on-premises caching appliance. 1 Source: ESG Research Report, Trends for Protecting Highly Virtualized and Private Cloud Environments, June 2013. 2 Source: ESG Research Report, Data Protection-as-a-service (DPaaS) Trends, September 2013.
Technology Brief: EMC Can Give Organizations More Than One Way to Do D2D2C 3 Disk to Disk to Cloud: One Box of Legos, and Several Instruction Manuals Embarking on a D2D2C implementation can feel like opening a box of Lego building blocks and finding multiple instruction manuals inside. Depending on which manual you choose, you could turn those pieces into a spaceship, a racecar, or a motorcycle. And, just as Legos can combine into many shapes, stretching data protection to the cloud can take more than one form. Here are a few examples of the variants of D2D2C architectures that exist: Backup-Servers On and Off Site: Some on-premises backup servers can replicate data to a second instance of the server operating in the cloud. It s a simple, generic process, functioning as if you had simply installed one server at your own Site A, and another at your own Site B, with each replicating to the other. Storage-based Replication between sites: A handful of traditional backup vendors have are now operating cloud repositories for clients. In this style of D2D2C, you point your on-prem appliance to that repository, and your backup data replicates to it. Backups written to faux-storage via Cloud Gateways: Some (older) backup software doesn t know how to extend to the cloud but does know how to write to an array. Happily, some cloud providers offer storage as a service (STaaS). In a STaaS setup, backup software doesn t realize it is writing data to cloud-based capacity; it just thinks it is sending data to the usual iscsi device, LUN, or whatever the case may be. The bottom line is that if you want fast, agile recovery and the reassurance that comes with having a far-away tertiary copy of data safely stored for DR or other reasons, then D2D2C is definitely an architecture to consider. 3 Which to Choose? It might appear that there are some additional details to consider as well. For example: If you choose to replicate to block storage, you ll need to install a backup appliance before you can use that repository. If you don t, restored data will look like blocks. If you replicate to a backup service, then at least you ll be able to view (and recover) the data using a web interface. An important step is to evaluate the cloud service provider s architecture flexibility. Can the vendor give you your own box of Lego building blocks customized to your organization s needs? Or will you be offered something completely locked down, and you ll simply get what you get? How conversant is the cloud solution provider with the tenets of infrastructure data protection, including concepts central to BC/DR? And will that provider share your urgency when you need to recover? Differences exist between a generic solution provider trying to offer every kind of cloud service under the sun, and a specialized provider that views backup as its core competency and sells cloud offerings as part of that portfolio. Other Considerations Having now chosen the topology that makes sense for your environments, there are a few other considerations to consider, not the least of which is that the network isn't free. Within a traditional datacenter, backup and server administrators often forget about the bandwidth coursing through their intranet s veins, as long as the throughput is perceived as adequate or non-impactful. But by moving to any cloud-based data protection solution, including the hybrid architectures listed above, backup/server administrators will learn what storage administrators had to learn a few years ago be nice to your network team. In this case, premature adoption of cloud-based backup solution that are not WAN-savvy will often result in impact to the production users access to the Internet, may overwhelm barely-adequate routers, or exceed the organization s allocated bandwidth. Done improperly, your data protection savings could cost the network budget. 3 Source: ESG video blog, D2D2C Is Like One Box of Legos and Two Manuals, Jason Buffington, February 2014.
Technology Brief: EMC Can Give Organizations More Than One Way to Do D2D2C 4 The Purchasing Decision: Choosing a Cloud-based Backup Service Vendor When ESG asked IT professionals whom they d prefer to consume BaaS from, the top choices mentioned were specialized backup/storage service providers (39%) and traditionally on-prem backup software vendors now offering cloud services (36%). 4 Other options didn t garner as much interest, namely, global public cloud providers offering backup/storage services (29%); telcos, ISPs, and MSPs (16%); and local resellers/systems integrators offering backup services (11%). Those lesser options don t make the top cut most likely because their business models encompass a much wider range of priorities. In other words, they re not full-fledged backup specialists who, at crunch time, will be ready with expertise, flexibility, and urgency to get everything running. A worst-case scenario can happen: A client suffers as a cloud provider holds to its contracted 24-hour recovery SLA because it needs time to contact its own backup software vendor for assistance. The provider is within its rights to do so, but the client is stuck until the proper steps are determined. The hesitancy to use local resellers is different. Resellers and SIs have an absolute willingness to help and good backup experts on staff. What they do not necessarily have is the means to stand up a raised floor or co-lo space, and then day in, day out, manage a data center s worth of backup infrastructure. Suiting Everyone s Needs Good cloud backup requires expertise, infrastructure, and a shared sense of urgency. EMC is a traditional backup software vendor with offerings matching the two most-often cited consumption preferences. Specifically, EMC is both a specialized BaaS provider and a traditional backup software vendor now offering cloud services. The EMC Data Protection & Availability Division (an outgrowth of the earlier EMC Backup & Recovery Systems division) has invested heavily in making EMC s on-premises data protection solutions cloud extensible. EMC also acquired and cultivated a well-regarded BaaS provider, now known as EMC Mozy. Relevant Offerings for a Hybrid Backup Architecture When one speaks of traditional data center solutions, the assumption is that production servers will be nearby, as will onsite competency, high bandwidth, etc. In such environments, EMC s classic data protection products more than suffice. But the Data Protection & Availability Division can boast of a whole portfolio of on-premises and hybrid backup solutions customers can acquire via a software-suite license model called the Data Protection Suite for even more flexibility. It includes: Data Domain protection storage, the mindshare and market share leader in deduplication storage systems. In a hybrid architecture, a Data Domain appliance can replicate to other Data Domain appliances within an intranet or across the Internet to solution providers around the globe. Users get a completely self-contained on-prem solution supporting a range of backup software while allowing a storage system to replicate an additional copy of data to another geography or data center. EMC NetWorker and EMC Avamar software for midsized and large-enterprise traditional backup/recovery, optimized for highly virtualized environments and widely used platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and Oracle. In a hybrid architecture, Avamar can replicate to other Avamar appliances, and both software offerings can leverage Data Domain hardware-based replication features to another Data Domain appliance at a cloud provider. SourceOne, EMC s archival solution. SourceOne allows IT to integrate archiving into a broader data protection strategy, with SourceOne data able to be replicated in a hybrid architecture using the Data Domain consolidated storage repository. Data Protection Advisor. DPA is a management framework that enables IT professionals to monitor the health of their EMC and non-emc backup solutions. In the heterogeneous world that most of us live in, coupled with 4 Source: ESG Research Report, Data Protection-as-a-service (DPaaS) Trends, September 2013.
Technology Brief: EMC Can Give Organizations More Than One Way to Do D2D2C 5 the realities of mergers and acquisitions forcing multiple solutions into environments of all sizes, visibility, especially with a common taxonomy, is crucial. EMC Mozy, acquired in 2007 and today part of the Data Protection & Availability Division. Mozy enjoyed name recognition initially in consumer-based data protection of endpoint devices. Mozy moved continually upmarket and now supports midsized and large organizations looking for cloud-based backup services with the level of enterprise security integration and monitoring that large enterprises expect. In a hybrid architecture, one might protect data centers by leveraging the Data Domain-powered infrastructure, and endpoint devices (particularly BYOD) through a cloud-based service such as Mozy. In addition, to the EMC Data Protection Suite, EMC s Avamar technology powers VMware vsphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA) and can replicate VDP data to either an Avamar target or a Data Domain protection storage appliance. In that way, it bolsters a hybrid architecture (which also includes VMware vcloud Hybrid Service, a recently announced hosting offering). With cloud-based backup (Mozy) for endpoints and traditional backups (NetWorker/Avamar/DataDomain) for datacenter, the best practice for protecting remote offices and distributed branch facilities in a hybrid architecture will depend on a few factors. In general, the determining factor for which instruction manual to use in conjunction with EMC s impressive box of data protection box of Legos (i.e., which solutions to implement) depends in part on how centralized or decentralized the management of backup is among the IT personnel in the organization. It would also depend on the practical limitations of your WAN links across locations compared with the availability of cloud-based services in the local region(s). The Bigger Truth It is undeniable that the cloud is, or at least will be, a part of every IT strategy moving forward. The cloud, however, is also simply an operational and deployment vehicle. With that fact in mind, and in considering the characteristics of a hybrid data protection architecture, one must be careful and specific when selecting the architecture s building blocks. It is crucial to choose pieces and parts suited for architecting a D2D2C solution fitting the organization s business and technical requirements. A cloud-based data protection solution should be driven not only by smart technologies, but also by smart technology professionals who are experts in data protection and competent at maintaining data centers. It is easy to understand why so many IT organizations are looking at turnkey backup-as-a-service offerings and looking also at their long-trusted backup software and hardware vendors to meet their requirements. It should come as no surprise to see that EMC has invested in and is continuing to innovate and refine a portfolio of data protection capabilities covering pure cloud, hybrid, and a wide range of on-premises data protections, including integrating those capabilities ever more closely to give customers the flexibility they need. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.