THE FOUR STEPS TO A TAPELESS BACKUP ENVIRONMENT: YOUR HOW-TO GUIDE FOR DATA MANAGEMENT SUCCESS WHITE PAPER CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 2 ASSESSMENT 3 EVALUATION 6 IMPLEMENTATION 7 MANAGEMENT 8 CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION You live in a world of constant data growth. In fact, IDC estimates that data will continue to double approximately every two years until 2020. 1 This puts tremendous pressure on IT as new resources must be added to manage your ever expanding storage volumes and, by extension, your data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure. Yet while your data is growing, your business service level agreements (SLAs) pertaining to data backup, recovery, DR, and compliance are staying flat, and in many cases becoming more stringent. Backup hardware, however, has not remained stagnant, and there is an abundance of new technologies available whether tape-based, disk-based, or even cloud-centric. Finally, your applications have also evolved with many new technologies being implemented including virtualization, cloud computing, backup applications, and more advanced application functionality. DATA GROWTH SLAs Applications Hardware The collision of these elements has left IT administrators in a bind. Failure to meet business SLAs is not an option, but it has become progressively harder to meet requirements as IT complexity continues to increase. As a result, many companies are looking to technology advancements to address their business needs with the hope of spending less time, money, and energy on data backup, recovery, and DR. 1 IDC. The Digital Universe In 2020: Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth inthe Far East. December 2012.
One of the most common strategies to enhance your data backup, recovery, and DR suggests moving your system to a tapeless environment. It s not the economics or reliability of the technology that s causing organizations to search for alternatives, but rather the manageability and level of expertise the technology requires. But how exactly can you do this? What are the critical considerations and decisions you must make to effectively and reliably migrate to a new medium? This white paper addresses these questions and provides a four-step outline for you to follow to start moving away from tape technology. STEP 1: ASSESSMENT The first step in migrating to a tapeless strategy is to assess all of your business and product needs for a data backup, recovery, and DR solution. After you nail down your requirements you can begin to compare features and functions of potential alternatives. Today s numerous data backup, recovery, and DR solutions offer varying combinations of budgetary, recovery time objective (RTO), and recovery point objective (RPO) options. DEFINITIONS RTO: A recovery time objective (RTO) is the duration of time within which a computer, system, network, or application must be restored after a failure or disaster occurs without crippling consequences. RPO: A recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum period that data must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down. Copy Data/Continuous Data Protection Snapshots Replication Cost Disk Cloud Tape Seconds RTO/RPO Minutes Hours Days 2
However, understanding RTO and RPO alone isn t enough; you must also look at your environment in the context of the following considerations. ASSESSING YOUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT Considerations Questions to Ask Yourself Why This Matters to You Backup Windows Do you have a defined backup window? What is that today and how will it change in the future? Speed is critical for backup windows. You need a solution that can meet the backup windows you have today and will have in the future. Growth Expectations Disaster Recovery How do you anticipate your environment growing over the coming months and years? What are your DR requirements today? And what will they look like in the future? Growth is a fact of life. You need to consider how a solution will scale with your environment. You should think about both performance and capacity scalability. DR is a critical component of data protection. The problem gets exponentially more difficult as data grows. Think carefully about your current and future DR requirements and how a given solution supports those models. Retention Requirements What are your current retention requirements? How do you envision those changing over time? Retention is typically driven by business SLAs and compliance. Different protection systems offer varying retention options and some solutions can limit flexibility. Application-specific Needs What applications (i.e. Oracle, SQL, Exchange, etc.) and environments (physical, virtual, or both) are you operating in your infrastructure? Do they have different protection requirements? Backup solutions vary from point solutions that support certain environments like VMware, for example, to massively heterogeneous offerings that support the most complex corporate environments. You need to ensure that you choose the right offering to align with your business objectives. Budget What monetary considerations do your business objectives require? Prices for various backup solutions can vary widely from pennies to hundreds of dollars per GB and the prices depend on the other criteria described above. Regardless of the type of technology you choose, there are multiple delivery and hardware options you must consider as well. Be it service, hardware, software, or a hybrid configuration, you should keep your business objectives in mind to make the right selection for you and your organization. Finally, you need to know where and how you re going to back up your data. If you re moving away from tape, will you be backing up to disk, the cloud, or perhaps a combination of the two? STEP 2: EVALUATION Once you understand your business objectives, you can start evaluating all of your technology options. As you consider these options, remember that you don t have to choose just one and, in fact, you may choose to operate multiple technologies simultaneously to address various RTO, RPO, and business requirements. 3
TECHNOLOGIES TO CONSIDER Technology What It Is Why It s Worth Considering Drawbacks Disk-based backup with deduplication Backing up data to a disk target instead of a tape solution. Disk systems provide strong performance, reliability, and efficiency. Deduplication extends this benefit by delivering a reduced dollar per gigabyte cost. Companies often need to retain data for extended periods of time. With a typical five-year span, deduplication systems will need to be updated frequently. Additionally, the cost per GB of these solutions, while better than non-deduplicated disk, is typically 5 10x more than tape. This is amplified as data is stored for extended periods of time. Cloud backup With cloud backup, core data is backed up over the Internet to a remote data center using advanced bandwidth reduction technologies like deduplication and compression. Since data is protected and is located at a remote site, the resulting solution provides both an effective data backup and DR solution. It can help simplify the backup process by automating both data backup and DR. Additionally, since the remote storage and servers are managed by the cloud provider, the process of managing backup and retention is dramatically simplified. These services are typically charged on a monthly basis and so capital costs are minimized. Cloud backup depends on the availability of sufficient bandwidth for data backup and, more importantly, recovery. A lack of sufficient bandwidth can significantly impact RTOs. These solutions can also get expensive as data volumes grow and typically offer limited retention options. Snapshots A snapshot is a copy of your data at any particular point in time that is typically created on your primary storage array. A snapshot can be used to return your storage to a previous state after a failure. It offers zero impact backup with minimal or no application downtime, frequent backups for reduced recovery time, efficient backup of large data volumes, and reduced exposure to data loss. Snapshots are typically created on primary storage and often use expensive disk capacity. Additionally, storage system performance can be impacted by the number of snapshots retained on a system; therefore long-term snapshot storage can impact storage operations and drive up costs. Copy Data Management A system that centralizes redundant copies of corporate data created by the various point tools, and is used to protect, share, and analyze information. Copy data solutions provide a number of advanced features including snapshots, replication, and compression that are independent of the underlying storage infrastructure. Since copy data systems are independent of the existing infrastructure, you will typically have to purchase and manage these systems separately from existing hardware and software. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) CDP is a technology that automatically backs up selected data whenever any change is made. A record is kept each time data changes and is stored on a disk system. Since it preserves a record of every transaction that takes place in your enterprise, CDP allows for extremely granular RPOs. Since CDP systems store large quantities of transactions, they often need significant storage capacity. This requirement grows exponentially as data retention increases. Additionally, CDP technologies are often specialized for certain applications and environments. Replication Replication duplicates stored or archived data in real time across a network to a duplicate system typically in a remote location. The technology enhances data reliability and accessibility. Replication provides redundancy that can be invaluable if the main storage backup system fails. It can minimize downtime and streamline disaster recovery processes by generating duplicate copies of all backed-up files on a continuous basis. It can also speed up and simplify recovery in the wake of a disaster. Replication systems typically require two storage systems of the same type, thus doubling the potential cost. Additionally, by instantly replicating data changes between sites, a data corruption event in one site could be instantly duplicated to the second, therefore data protection cannot be guaranteed. General-purpose Backup Applications General-purpose backup applications were built to perform most common backup tasks including, copying, archiving, and restoring data in the event of data loss. These applications fulfill the core requirements of any data backup, recovery, and DR strategy. They are typically highly mature and support heterogeneous environments. They also natively support current technologies such as disk, tape, and cloud. Traditional backup applications are mature and robust, but the same maturity can lead to applications that lack the flexibility and advanced functionality of the newest technologies. Specialized Backup Applications Specialized backup applications are more focused adaptations of their general-purpose predecessors and are generally focused on specific operating environments, such as VMware or Hyper-V. The specialized nature of these solutions means that they integrate tightly with their supported environments. For example, VMware solutions will typically leverage the newest VMware APIs and management tools. Many organizations have a range of technologies including multiple applications and physical and virtual servers. These specialized applications, while powerful for protecting specific environments, offer limited breadth. Therefore, users will typically have to purchase alternate, redundant heterogeneous backup solutions to protect those servers that are not supported by these specialized applications. Applicationspecific Backups Application-specific backups were designed to work with specific applications. A classic example would be Oracle RMAN, which is commonly used to protect Oracle databases. By tightly integrating with production applications, these backup solutions often provide the most consistent, robust, reliable, and application-aware protection model. The application-specific nature of this technology is its biggest weakness because you would need multiple of these to protect a typical heterogeneous environment. The breadth of these solutions could rapidly become complex and unmanageable. 4
After you have evaluated all of your data backup, recovery, and DR options, you can narrow those down to a select few that align with your organization and business objectives. The next step in moving away from a tape strategy is to test your new alternatives. When it comes to data backup and recovery, it s the recovery that really matters. Therefore, when considering a new backup solution, it s critical to test it, but what processes do you need to go through when evaluating and testing these various solutions to ensure you can truly recover all of your data? The following practices can and should be used to evaluate your potential new solution(s). It s also essential to note that you should use as much real-world data as possible throughout this process. The best way to test a solution is to simulate real-world data loss scenarios to see how you can react to them in real-time. These practices include: BEST PRACTICES FOR TESTING A NEW SOLUTION Best Practice Test data backup, recovery, and DR Why You Should Test It You need to understand how the solution meets your basic data backup, recovery, and DR requirements. Remember, you should test these same functions across the range of servers you have, including both physical and virtual and OS options such as Windows, Linux, or Unix. Not all solutions handle these challenges equally, so it s critical to know the strength and weakness of each chosen option. When it comes to data backup and recovery, it s the recovery that really matters. Therefore, when considering a new backup solution, it s critical to test it. Test applicationspecific functionality Your environment likely has multiple applications. You should test how the selected options support your databases, Virtual Machines, and email. Some solutions can support all of these applications in a robust and consistent fashion, and others are more limited. Test system and physical reliability You will be running this environment for years to come and could be storing data for decades or more, so it s critical that your system is reliable and consistent. You should test the system by purposefully introducing hardware and/or software faults to see how the system responds. Test system expansion Growth is a common challenge because your backup system must grow with your production storage. As part of your evaluation, you must understand how the selected systems will grow and test those systems to ensure they can be completed consistently and reliably. 5
It s essential to allow enough time to effectively initiate your migration. In addition to the migration itself, you should also take into account time to test and be prepared to wait for problems to be resolved. STEP 3: IMPLEMENTATION Now that you ve chosen and tested your new data backup, recovery, and DR solution, the next logical step is implementation. And in order to effectively and compliantly implement this new solution, there are critical steps you should take to ensure success. Therefore, before jumping right in, you need to develop a plan for the migration to your new solution. You must also take today s increasingly stringent government regulations and constantly evolving security concerns into account when building this plan. With this plan you should take the following steps: Steps Prioritize applications you want to migrate Budget enough time for the initial migration STEPS FOR IMPLEMENTATION Tips for Success Deciding which applications you re going to migrate is a crucial step. Make sure to determine which applications are mission-critical to your business before beginning your migration to save time, money, and resources. You might want to start by migrating less critical applications since the initial migrations could be more complex and disruptive. You can move to the more critical applications once you have the migration process refined and documented. It s essential to allow enough time to effectively initiate your migration. In addition to the migration itself, you should also take into account time to test and be prepared to wait for problems to be resolved. Create a repeatable migration process It s important to simplify your migration as much as possible to create consistent migration documentation. Consistency will enable you to implement an easily repeatable process that can lead to enhanced efficiency and minimize the risk of data loss. Decide what you will do with retained information Before you finalize your migration plan, take some time to think about what you ll do with your retained information. Will you include it in your migration? Or will you keep it on your existing media? When your plan is solid, you can finally begin to execute your migration away from tape technology. Be sure to run your existing system and your new solution in parallel throughout the process to ensure recovery from either system in case problems should arise. Also, verify that your migration was successful by testing your data backup, recovery, and DR again after the process has been completed. 6
STEP 4: MANAGEMENT You ve done it. You ve migrated from your legacy tape system. So what s next? What s the final piece to this puzzle? It s time to think about how you will manage your new infrastructure. But what about the data that s still retained on legacy hardware and is managed by your legacy systems? How can you maintain and operate your legacy processes while you re simultaneously looking to innovate with your new technology? Your core challenge then becomes balancing your needs of today while planning, testing, and implementing new innovations for the future. In reality, these competing initiatives can be difficult to balance and many organizations spend far too much time and money on maintaining older systems that are rarely, if ever, accessed. However, when thinking about your legacy hardware and software, you have two options to maintain the information stored on this older media. You can either manage your legacy media in-house or leverage a third-party partner to do it for you. Regardless of the method you choose, it s important to carefully consider both of these options. IN-HOUSE VS. THIRD-PARTY MANAGEMENT OF LEGACY DATA Pros Manage Legacy Media In-house Choosing to maintain your own legacy systems gives you control of and instant visibility into your infrastructure. It allows you to ensure secure and proper management of your legacy backup systems. Additionally, by keeping your system management in-house, you can maintain consistent and compliant processes throughout your infrastructure. Leverage a Third-Party Partner Outsourcing the management of your legacy media to a third-party partner helps you balance all of your competing initiatives by enabling you to accelerate innovation by focusing more time on your new technology and less on traditional operational matters. It also allows you to store and retrieve your information securely and removes your burden of license, hardware, and software cost. Operational complexity is also simplified by enabling you to either automate or outsource traditional time consuming operational activities such as data backup, recovery, and DR. Cons Maintaining legacy infrastructures can be extremely complex and costly. Not only must you maintain the expertise and knowledge of your retired environments, but you also must pay a premium for hardware and software maintenance on your older systems to ensure access to support in case of a recovery failure. Finally, your infrastructure will also have to bear the burden of required power, cooling, and data center space for these infrequently accessed systems. With this model, you give up your control and are reliant on a third party for access to your data. Additionally, the challenges that are created with outsourcing services can possibly put unnecessary strain on your organization and ultimately your infrastructure. 7
CONCLUSION There s no doubt data backup, recovery, and DR are three critical components of today s IT infrastructure. These technologies serve to protect your data center by delivering consistent and reliable functionality and support in case of data loss, corruption, or disaster. As you continue to think about moving to a tapeless backup environment, it s essential to keep all of the decisions and considerations from this white paper in mind to enhance your data backup, recovery, and DR processes now and for generations to come. ABOUT IRON MOUNTAIN Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) provides information management services that help organizations lower the costs, risks, and inefficiencies of managing their physical and digital data. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain manages billions of information assets, including backup and archival data, electronic records, document imaging, business records, secure shredding, and more, for organizations around the world. Visit the company website at www.ironmountain.com for more information. 2015 Iron Mountain Incorporated. All rights reserved. Iron Mountain and the design of the mountain are registered trademarks of Iron Mountain Incorporated in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. US-DM-EXT-WP-060614-001