I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T

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1 I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T U s i n g t h e C loud to Delive r D a t a Protection and B u s i n e s s C ontinuity B e s t P r a c tices May 2015 Sponsored by NetApp Data protection is one of the primary use cases for cloud storage. Ensuring that data is in the right place at the right time for recovery represents the most challenging and important aspect of restoring data for business continuity. Data that is stored and staged in the cloud can be restored more easily, more accurately, and more quickly than data that is migrated to/from a remote vault. This paper examines trends regarding cloud backup and data protection and how NetApp's SnapProtect backup management software and AltaVault cloud-integrated storage can play a role in simplifying the effort. Introduction The cloud has become an essential component of IT solutions for many organizations. A recent IDC study of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) found that 53% of respondents use the cloud today, while an additional 35% expect to deploy a cloud business solution in the next months. Common cloud solutions for business continuity include backup as a service (BaaS), recovery as a service (RaaS), and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Two primary factors are driving businesses to adopt cloud-based BC solutions: better service-level agreement (SLA) delivery and reduced data protection costs. When an organization uses traditional tape-based offsite data storage, a 24-hour recovery point objective (RPO) is the best that can be achieved. This means that in the event of a complete system failure, site failure, or natural disaster, the most that business can hope for is only one day of lost data processing. Moreover, tape is prone to damage from handling, loss, or theft, and the data image fades over time. Tape is also inherently labor intensive, requiring an operator to load, unload, move, and transfer tapes on a daily basis. From a business standpoint, 24-hour RPO is simply no longer a best practice. In addition, business users have an expectation that no data will be lost (zero RPO as the result of an outage). While IT managers know that zero RPO is not cost justifiable for most applications, an RPO greater than four hours is intolerable to users in many cases. The following are three key backup best practices: Near 100% reliability. Failed backup jobs result in jeopardized data and the possibility of an RPO greater than 24 hours. Immediate, automated offsite data transfer. Automated offsite transfer of data reduces the risk of data loss due to human error or calamity and can be accomplished at any time during the day, including multiple times per day. End-user self-service. Permitting end users to recover data without IT intervention improves user satisfaction and reduces time to recovery. IDC 1922

2 The near ubiquity of virtual computing has also made BC in the cloud more attractive. The dynamic migration of virtual machines makes reestablishing an application service rather simple, assuming the related data is available. With data regularly replicated to the cloud and virtual machine migration, recovery time objectives (RTOs) can be a fraction of the time of traditional methodologies. One key benefit of cloud BC deployments is the potential for cost savings. Having a BC plan and capability is a best practice, but paying too much is not. The on-demand nature of cloud can result in substantial cost savings over maintaining a remote system that sits idly waiting for something to fail. Despite these clear benefits, the adoption of BC in the cloud has been slowed by the complexity of integrating solution components and relatively slow data transfer speeds, especially for large data sets. Staging data in the cloud is inherently a hybrid operation, whereby storage administrators copy data from an on-premise datacenter to a third-party cloud repository. Doing so requires management software combined with a purpose-built appliance to simplify and automate the operation as well as deduplicate and compress data to optimize data transfer speeds. It's cliché to say that IT organizations must "do more with less." However, data backup and business continuity are perfect opportunities to automate tasks, thereby freeing up administrators for higher-value activities. Appliances that move data to the cloud are an important half of this solution, but the other half is backup administration that can track and manage data between the on-premise repository and the cloud. Backup management software not only makes the administrator's job simpler but also reduces the time needed to restore business operations, leading to better RTO results. Thus, having a backup appliance or backup management software is not enough; the optimum solution requires both. Definitions To help organizations avoid the confusion that can result from different uses of terms, IDC offers the following definitions: Recovery point objective (RPO): The point in time at which data has been protected and can be restored with assured data integrity (Said differently, it is the maximum amount of data that will be lost, in terms of hours of operation, if a system failure occurs. For example, a one-hour RPO means one hour of lost data.) Recovery time objective (RTO): The total amount of time needed to restore application services from the moment those services are interrupted Disk to disk to tape (D2D2T): The process of copying data from a disk source to a disk target and subsequently on to a tape target for a total of three data copies Disk to disk to cloud (D2D2C): The process of copying data from a disk source to a disk target and subsequently on to a cloud target for a total of three data copies Purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA): An integrated unit of hardware and software used as a data backup target Backup as a service (BaaS): A cloud-based service where the cloud repository is simply a backup target, usually on-demand; does not include any additional compute or network resources for application recovery Recovery as a service (RaaS): BaaS functionality plus on-demand compute and network resources necessary to establish a functioning application environment Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): RaaS functionality plus consulting, runbooks, and personnel plans for extended application operations IDC

3 Benefits Organizations considering BC in the cloud need to understand both the pros and the cons of such a solution, as described in Table 1. TABLE 1 Pros and Cons of Cloud for Business Continuity Pros Data is secure and professionally managed. Data is offsite, protected from any site interruption or disaster. Cost per GB is often quite low. Data can be retained for archival purposes. Cons Cloud uses RESTful protocols, which may not be supported by existing infrastructure. Data movement to/from the cloud can be slow and expensive. Cloud datacenters operate at a high standard for security and resilience (i.e., SSAE 16) and are actively managed 24 x 7. The first step to BC is ensuring data survival. Cloud backup is the most certain way to do this. Cloud data storage costs have declined significantly recently and may be $.01 per GB per month or even lower. In addition to serving as a BC/DR repository, cloud is also suitable for archiving purposes because it provides low-cost storage. Moving data to a cloud provider is not as simple as pointing the backup to it. An intermediate process or appliance is needed to communicate with the cloud provider in its specific protocol. While the $/GB of cloud is attractive, some cloud providers charge significant fees to move data into or out of the cloud. Users will want appliances that aggressively deduplicate and/or compress data to minimize this data transfer and cost. Source: IDC, 2015 Desirable Cloud BC Solution Features Organizations should consider the following list of desirable features to facilitate their evaluation of solutions that enable cloud BC: Seamless integration between the on-premise backup and recovery solution and the cloud. Managing two separate repositories defeats the purpose of reducing manual labor. Using a management application to manage the entire system is a best practice for cloud BC. Deduplication of data before the data is transmitted to the cloud. Deduplication, in both the backup process and the data transfer process, is critical to being able to move the large amounts of data generated by organizations today. WAN optimization further improves the solution. Multiprovider support. Different cloud providers use different protocols and data storage methodologies. To avoid provider lock-in, IT organizations should look for appliance and management software that can support a variety of cloud providers. Encryption from source to target. Data security has become a serious issue in nearly every organization. End-to-end encryption is not only a best practice but also a requirement in many cases IDC 3

4 Trends Given budget pressures and skill shortages, IT organizations are focusing on applications and tasks that deliver strategic value to the business. Although data protection and business continuity are essential tasks, they do not inherently make an organization more competitive in the marketplace. With the potential cost and operational advantages of cloud, organizations are attempting to offload the BC capability to providers that, in many cases, can offer the required service levels at advantageous prices. Offloading such tasks frees up the IT team to pursue higher-value projects. In addition to IT organizations utilizing cloud for internal tasks, business units are also driving the adoption of cloud solutions, especially around software as a service. Some users also use third-party file sharing services to store and share large files. IT organizations may have indirect control of these repositories at best. As a result of these diverse use cases, corporate data is being spread across multiple repositories, making it challenging for IT to ensure data protection. However, having a single cloud repository for BC purposes, to which multiple sites can be replicated, can reduce this complexity. It's possible that IT will get the best of both worlds in a hybrid solution. Cloud providers may use different methods for data ingress and egress. Standards are coalescing around RESTful and OpenStack APIs. However, it will be important for IT organizations to select solutions that can offer the ability to move data into and out of a variety of repositories without resorting to custom solutions. Despite the benefits, cloud solutions are not without risk. Two main risks to IT organizations are as follows: Unwieldy data growth. As data flows into the cloud repository, over time the accumulated data may become so large that moving hundreds of terabytes may become very costly or impractical. Data deduplication, along with data retention policies that prune obsolete data, can help mitigate this risk. Provider failure. Cloud providers have not failed frequently, but they do fail occasionally. IT organizations need to ensure that their data is not locked up and unavailable in a bankrupt datacenter. D2D2C strategies ensure that an organization has at least two local copies of the data. Considering NetApp's SnapProtect and AltaVault NetApp SnapProtect backup management application and AltaVault cloud-integrated storage provide the combination of backup management and purpose-built cloud-integrated storage appliance from one vendor that offers IT organizations an easy on-ramp to cloud data protection and business continuity. This solution offers storage managers a complete solution to manage their backup environment both on-premise and in the cloud to enable the best possible RTO regardless of application interruption event. The result is an end-to-end NetApp solution that manages both backup images and snapshots. Organizations can achieve better RPOs as short as 15 minutes when they integrate snapshots into the overall solution than when they use backup alone. The AltaVault appliance provides a seamless connection to the cloud. It works with more than 20 different cloud providers using standard cloud interfaces, understands the nuances of each, and optimizes the data for each specific cloud target. It compresses and deduplicates the data before sending it to the cloud, which reduces IT's cost to store and transfer data in the cloud. Thus, IT organizations have a D2D2C implementation that is fully automated. The AltaVault solution works with nearly every backup application. SnapProtect is recommended for use with NetApp FAS, V-Series, FlexArray, and FlexPod environments. It is used with NetApp IDC

5 storage to control, manage, and catalog backup data. As noted previously, this includes NetApp snapshots for granular, faster recovery. In cases, such as SoftLayer, an IBM Company, where the cloud back-end storage is hosted on NetApp storage, the whole solution is truly end-to-end NetApp to ensure seamless operation and compatibility. When utilizing Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the solution can include RaaS in the cloud for a full BC solution. IDC estimates that the percentage of virtualized x86 environments will grow from 69.7% today to 71.7% by Moreover, RaaS and DRaaS solutions depend upon virtualization for their on-demand computing model. SnapProtect is virtualization aware, supporting both VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. It can facilitate snapshots on NetApp FAS systems for NAS data while ensuring application and LUN consistency. SnapProtect supports D2D2T implementations, but the combination of SnapProtect and AltaVault offer several advantages over tape solutions. First of all, when NAS is backed up to tape using NDMP, the backup image is an object-level backup of the entire file system, which then must be restored as a whole. In contrast, SnapProtect allows more granular restore operations, including by virtual machine, VMDK or, of course, the entire data store. NetApp further claims that this solution offers a 90% reduction in TCO compared with non-deduplicated tape when one factors in the manual effort to manage physical tape as well. AltaVault has several built-in features that enhance the efficiency of the solution, one of which is inline, variable segment length deduplication. When this is paired with SnapProtect, users can choose between source- or target-side deduplication, depending on the workload. The data remains deduplicated and compressed throughout its whole life cycle, meaning that in a public cloud environment, the data ingress and egress costs, as well as storage itself, are minimized. Where data is deduplicated may also be determined by the network bandwidth of the WAN. AltaVault includes WAN optimization technology in addition to deduplication. For situations with limited bandwidth, deduplication and WAN optimization reduce the data transfer to a fraction of what it would otherwise be. Deduplication can reduce data capacity used by up to 90% and improve effective data transfer throughput fourfold. Because data sent to the cloud is offsite, best practices demand that data be secured from theft or inadvertent disclosure. The regulatory penalties for data disclosure, even when inadvertent, are becoming increasingly severe. This is especially true in Europe, but the rest of the world is not far behind. The SnapProtect/AltaVault solution ensures that data is secure at all times, with at-rest and in-flight encryption using AES 256-bit encryption technology. This is compliant with FIPS Level 1 and uses industry-standard SSL and TLS encryption to ensure safe data transmission. Encryption keys are managed locally by the customer's security department even when data is stored in the cloud. Self-service capabilities of the package include the ability for application owners to initiate backup operations without administrative intervention. This is especially important in highly virtualized environments where virtual machines and the applications on them can be provisioned in a matter of hours or even minutes. As such, the establishment of a backup policy becomes an integrated part of the provisioning process rather than a disconnected secondary process prone to being overlooked. As a result, applications owners are more satisfied, the risk of data loss is reduced and the backup administrator is freed up to perform other tasks IDC 5

6 Challenges IDC research among small and medium-sized businesses indicates that 61.7% of such organizations have an RPO requirement of less than one hour, while 61% have a maximum RTO of four hours and 37% have a required RTO of under two hours. Cloud backup alone cannot meet these SLAs; IT organizations will need to use cloud providers that can provide RaaS and/or DRaaS in addition to BaaS. These organizations should look to NetApp to lead the way regarding partnerships, qualification, certification, and enhancements related to the SnapProtect/AltaVault solution. The reality is that remote repositories are rarely used for a full-scale data recovery. Having such a capability is a best practice and essential to business survival if a true disaster does occur. Even though cloud economics substantially lowers the cost of a BC solution, it is still an investment simply waiting for something to fail. This data could be put to use for other purposes, such as data mining. IT users can save additional money by finding ways to leverage the cloud repository for other purposes. Conclusion Data backup is one of the clearest and most cost-justifiable use cases for cloud storage. IT organizations can automate and offload a routine task to free themselves for more valuable activities. For many applications, it may be possible for organizations to completely eliminate tape from the backup process. Eliminating tape reduces the risk of data loss as well as the cost of manually processing the media itself. Properly staged data in the cloud may also significantly improve service-level delivery. To make the most of the cloud opportunity, organizations need two key capabilities: management of the backup environment and a gateway to move the data to the cloud. Desirable features include compression, deduplication, WAN optimization, and the ability to communicate with a wide variety of cloud providers, plus simple setup and administration. The combination of SnapProtect and AltaVault is designed to provide IT organizations with the building blocks they need for an on-ramp to a cloud storage deployment. The integrated package of backup management software and PBBA makes for faster, simpler implementation for IT organizations than buying separate products and doing the integration work themselves. Organizations looking to implement cloud backup and business continuity will want to consider this package from NetApp. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the IDC Custom Solutions information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document require an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC Custom Solutions, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC