Taking the Pulse of Your Organization's Backup Processes

One would be hard pressed these days to find an IT executive who believes his or her backup process is healthy. In fact, most would probably say the opposite: that their backup processes are broken. Organizations know this and yet they feel unable to respond since budget freezes, staff reductions and new internal and external requirements make fixing the problem seem impossible. This perception, however, is false. IT can heal backup under current circumstances.

Five considerations for better backup
Fixing backup is not a simple matter, nor should it be presented as such. However, there are five considerations we can examine when discussing the opportunity to improve the backup situation plaguing data centers.

1. Determine the biggest pain points you need to solve. Most IT organizations need some immediate relief from current backup pain, including day-to-day tactical problems such as failed backups and recoveries. They also need to meet heightened recovery expectations with fewer resources; that is, recover data when and where needed to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs). Additional goals will likely include gaining adaptability, flexibility and scalability, as well as the ability to respond to constantly changing demands without disruptive changes to the backup infrastructure. This might also be an opportune moment to make sure whatever changes you make will support the test and development environments that require multiple copies of production data. With shrinking application development windows, access to near-real time copies of production data for testing is important.

2. Move backup to disk. Backup to tape for disaster recovery (DR) purposes is costly, time consuming and ineffective when time-to-recovery is the primary measure of effectiveness. The trap that organizations must be careful not to fall into is assuming that they can solve such a problem using outdated tape methodologies. Backup and recovery may be the immediate pain points that companies seek to address, but backup and recovery problems reflect the new challenges that organizations face when optimizing existing backup infrastructures for DR.

Disk is the lynchpin to redesigning a corporation’s backup infrastructure. It solves existing backup and recovery problems while giving organizations new ways to use the backup data that were not available when data was stored to tape. First, companies must look to implement a disk-based storage system as a backup target. This includes disk targets such as networked attached storage (NAS) or virtual tape libraries (VTLs), as well as other advanced forms of disk-based data protection such deduplication, WAN optimized replication and continuous data protection (CDP) using advanced snapshot technology.

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Source: wwpi.com
By: Mike DiMeglio