Stop Doing Backup! Deploying Progressive and Proven Data Protection Approaches to Meet Today s 24/365 Business Requirements

Transcription

1 Stop Doing Backup! Deploying Progressive and Proven Data Protection Approaches to Meet Today s 24/365 Business Requirements Dot Hill Systems Introduction 1

2 Contents Introduction... 3 Business Interrupted = Business Reality... 3 RTO and RPO: The Name of the Game... 4 What s So Bad about Backup?... 4 Progressive and Proven Alternatives to Backup... 6 The First Line of Defense RAID Drive level Protection... 6 Snapshots Quick, Local Recovery... 6 Dot Hill: Storage Systems Built with Data Protection in Mind... 6 Dot Hill AssuredSnap and AssuredCopy... 7 Customer Example:... 7 Remote Replication Moving Data Safely Offsite... 8 Dot Hill AssuredRemote... 8 Stop Doing Backup! Put Your Storage System to Work for You... 9 About Dot Hill... 9 Dot Hill Systems Introduction 2

3 Introduction Since the advent of the Information Age, data has become the lifeblood of any business. As such, businesses put a hefty price tag on the value of this data; on average, companies value 100 megabytes of data at more than $1 million (Source: Ontrack Data International). Additionally, evolving business and regulatory mandates are driving ever more stringent requirements for data backup, restore, and retention. To this end, the issue of data protection is now paramount, and awareness of the issue has moved well up the food chain to the executive ranks. However traditional back up technologies are no longer ideal to meet today s 24/365 business requirements. Companies are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that they need to stop doing backup and start leveraging more progressive data protection approaches to ensure data availability and minimize down time in recovery. Fortunately, advances in technology combined with key market dynamics have made robust and comprehensive data protection economical, as well as easy to use. Business Interrupted = Business Reality In the wake of wide-scale catastrophic events such as Hurricane Katrina, most business leaders have come to understand the potential business impact stemming from natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, floods, and earthquakes. But IT leaders know many more scenarios exist that can prevent access to business systems and data events that can range from power outages, computer viruses and malware, employee (internal) sabotage and external data fraud, and even terrorist attacks. When you consider all these scenarios, it s easy to see how vulnerable companies are when it comes to IT interruptions and data outages. Estimates show that 1 out of 500 data centers will have a severe disaster each year. What s more, research shows that for those companies affected, many will never recover. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster later filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. A frequently cited study in Contingency Planning and Management magazine found that 40 percent of companies that shut down for three days failed within 36 months. While it varies according to industry segment, it is estimated that every hour of computer downtime can cost businesses thousands, and even millions of dollars. Ideally, every company would want to have a fully redundant datacenter that can handle a fail-over of the entire business instantly. But this expensive solution is nowhere within the realm of practicality for most businesses today. As data grows exponentially, there is likewise a growing cost associated with data protection, so organizations must ensure they are using budgets strategically. Dot Hill Systems Introduction 3

4 RTO and RPO: The Name of the Game When crafting data protection strategies, businesses need to consider both Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO refers to how long it takes to recover your data and applications in the event of a system outage or data loss, while RPO refers to the granularity of data recovery required. Can you go back to the very last change or is the most recent recoverable version of a file - hours or even days old acceptable? The criticality of business activities associated with an application and its data determines both RPO and RTO requirements. When working with traditional backup approaches, the consequences of downtime can be staggering. For example, faced with recovery of a 1TB Microsoft Exchange database, the 8+ hours of required recovery time will likely seriously impact your organization. Assessing RTO and RPO should be based on the perceived business impact of applications being unavailable, and the business impact of the loss of data. Businesses should ask, What functions of the business are critical to revenue generation? What functions are critical to normal operations? Which functions are less critical, but still important to the business? The answers to these questions help determine minimally acceptable timeframes to recover from a failure and how much data loss is acceptable. Figure 1. RTO and RPO vary according to application and criticality and must be carefully assessed. What s So Bad about Backup? A survey conducted a few years back that was widely cited and reported on by Infoworld, (Backing up Clogs Enterprise Systems, Oct. 17, 2007), revealed the many problems caused by large backup windows. The survey indicated that backup volumes in many organizations have grown so large that they are causing business disruption by tying up systems, storage and network capacity and hogging valuable IT resources. More than half (59 percent) of IT executives surveyed said that the volume of data they are forced to back up is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually; and 93 percent of those surveyed said their routine backup volumes are continuing to increase. What s more, the problem is Dot Hill Systems RTO and RPO: The Name of the Game 4

5 consuming IT resources for long periods, with 37 percent [of IT executives] admitting that daily backups of primary data now take them more than nine hours, while 19 percent said it took them more than 12 hours. Aside from these time and resource implications, the prospect of moving tapes offsite also exposes a business to risk. In the past few years, there have been numerous reports of data breaches due to backup tape theft. While the costs can vary greatly, The Ponemon Research firm reported that data breaches cost companies an average of $197 per compromised record in legal fees and other expenses. Since there's no audit trail on tapes, there's no way you can determine if a tape has been compromised; a tape can be copied and returned without anyone s knowledge. Data recovery is also a long and tedious process often with one day or higher RPO. Tapes first must be retrieved from the off-site location, which in and of itself produces several hours of downtime. While diskbased data storage provides random data access, tape drive data can only be accessed sequentially, adding considerable time to any exploration of a data recovery point, often accompanied by unacceptable data loss. The RTO associated with this approaches are completely insufficient in today s increasingly competitive 24/365 business world. In addition, magnetic backup tape reports recovery failure rates as high as 20 to 50 percent, making it an unreliable form of data backup compared to disk-based backup systems. Another reason traditional backup approaches no longer meet today s enterprise needs is they don t support the heterogeneity that now has become the standard in just about every corporate storage environment. As storage area networks (SAN) have grown in size, complexity and heterogeneity, they've also become increasingly difficult to manage. A SAN serving a company with more than 10,000 employees has an average of 317 storage devices, according to industry analyst firm IDC. The more flavors of storage within a company, the more complex the backing up of that data becomes. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) associated with backup can be quite costly. Servers are but one of many cost considerations when it comes to understanding the TCO of a backup environment -- costs that can be characterized as hard and soft costs. Hard costs are costs associated with physical, tangible things (servers, network, disk, tape drives, shipping, etc.). Soft costs can include labor and administration as well as factors such as risk, efficiency, and systems downtime. Dot Hill Systems What s So Bad about Backup? 5

6 Progressive and Proven Alternatives to Backup While tape has long reigned as the de facto standard for back up, increasing data storage needs, shrinking backup windows, the need to recover critical applications quickly, and declining disk costs have caused disk to usurp tape at the primary media for data protection. In conjunction with disk as the chosen media, companies are beginning to leverage more advanced and cost-effective data protection approaches to ensure data availability and minimize down time in the event of a data loss incident. Today companies in need of advanced data protection and disaster recovery capabilities can put their storage systems to work with integrated RAID drive-level protection, snapshotting and remote replication. The First Line of Defense RAID Drive level Protection RAID drive-level protection, along with clustering, and local/remote mirroring is a strong first-line approach to prevent data loss. While RAID arrays can't prevent software or site failure, they do protect your organization from physical hardware failures or malfunction at the disk level, a somewhat common occurrence. RAID systems are a series of physical disks that act in concert to increase performance and/or protect the system and its data against the failure of any one disk (and in some cases, against the failure of multiple disks). Redundancy is used to reconstruct data in the event of drive failure, so even when a drive fails, the system will continue to run and provide data to the user. This is about as close to a sure thing as you can get in the data protection world; that s because when this recovery does occur, there is absolutely no down time required and no resulting data loss. Snapshots Quick, Local Recovery Just like it sounds, a snapshot is a picture of what the data looks like, complete with a set of reference markers, or pointers, to data stored on a disk drive, on a tape, or in the storage area network (SAN). A snapshot is something like a detailed table of contents, but it is treated by the computer as a complete data backup. Snapshots streamline access to stored data, vastly expediting the process of data recovery, providing the ability to instantly restore to any point-in-time snapshot. This improves overall business continuity by reducing downtime and data unavailability due to system or human errors. Dot Hill: Storage Systems Built with Data Protection in Mind Dot Hill has long understood that it s not enough to provide storage systems; rather, what s required are solutions to proactively safeguard and manage business data, and provide operational efficiencies to save time, effort and expense. Dot Hill storage with advanced RAID drive-level data protection, AssuredCopy. AssuredSnap and Assured Remote -- provides a complete data protection package that is both functional and affordable, and can help companies address and achieve business continuance, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance. Dot Hill Systems Progressive and Proven Alternatives to Backup 6

7 Dot Hill AssuredSnap and AssuredCopy AssuredSnap provides Dot Hill storage arrays with volume snapshot capability, allowing point-in-time copies that can be used to maximize business continuity, while AssuredCopy creates a full volume copy, which protects against disk failures. AssuredSnap provides the ability to create point-in-time copies or backups of disk volumes with instant restoration of data to any captured (snapshot) point in time. Since AssuredSnap only copies data that has changed to disk, it can virtually eliminate backup windows. Dot Hill's 'set and forget' scheduler capability gives storage administrators peace of mind, knowing the storage system is automatically taking snapshots and volume copies. Customer Example: Electronic Medical Records Provider, ICANotes Gets a New Prescription for Data Protection When thousands of doctors around the country rely on your software to stay connected with their patients 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, down time is out of the question. Headquartered in Annapolis, Md., ICANotes is the most widely used electronic health software for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. The solution enables behavioral specialists to access a patient s healthcare records any time from any computer with an Internet connection. With little or no typing required and no transcription expenses, records can be created and updated easily by authorized psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, counselors, nurse practitioners, group therapists and other mental health and behavioral health clinicians in hospitals, clinics and private practices across the country. With the benefits of electronic medical records becoming increasingly evident, business has been booming for ICANotes and so has the company s data storage needs. ICANotes has been growing at a rate of 50 percent per year over the last two years. And with incentives from recent federal legislation for behavioral healthcare businesses to make the conversion from paper charts to digital records, it looks like the prognosis for future business growth is very good. To support rapid, confidential, and reliable access to patient medical records, and store this data safely and back it up on a continuous basis, ICANotes installed a storage area network (SAN) based on Dot Hill 2330 storage arrays. The company had outgrown its direct-attach storage platform and could no longer do backups without experiencing down time a major problem. The Dot Hill iscsi-based SAN located the company s New Jersey-based data center, integrates with the ICANotes environment, which includes Dell 6-core PowerEdge servers running Windows Server and VMware vsphere. The SAN allows ICANotes software to run Microsoft Terminal Services for software delivery and to conduct backups of the FileMaker-based database using Dot Hill AssuredSnap snapshot software. Dot Hill Systems Dot Hill AssuredSnap and AssuredCopy 7

8 The Dot Hill SAN makes everything more highly available and greatly simplifies disaster recovery. Now we just perform a snapshot and we ve got our backup. It s pretty slick, said David Fencik, director of IT, ICANotes. Remote Replication Moving Data Safely Offsite Both RAID drive-level protection and snapshotting provide practical, affordable onsite data protection and recovery solutions. However, both are of little use if your data center is laid waste by a natural or manmade disaster; remote replication is intended to safeguard data in the event of such an occurrence. Remote replication involves moving snapshot volumes over IP to secondary storage devices at a remote site. Benefits of replication include complete recovery in minutes. It also helps ease the burden of backup operations by offloading the backup workload to the secondary servers you are replicating to. Dot Hill AssuredRemote Dot Hill AssuredRemote supports embedded-in-the-array remote replication of snapshot volumes, providing a remote replication solution that is fast and easy to deploy. Eliminating the requirement for host-based software agents, AssuredRemote offloads backup operations from critical application servers, thereby creating little to no impact to production servers by asynchronously copying and synchronizing data for up to 16 volumes simultaneously, directly between RAID arrays via the local SAN or wide area networks. Replication can operate via the Fibre Channel ports and/or the iscsi ports in the case of the dual protocol AssuredSAN 3900 models, and fully supports high-availability failover where dual controllers are employed. Using the existing point-in-time snapshot technology, AssuredRemote only captures changed data, thereby limiting the amount of data copied across to the remote site and also reduces the size of snapshots by storing only a single instance of changed blocks. This method minimizes the amount of data to be copied across already stressed data lines and may reduce the need for additional communication links. To further lessen the burden on external links, the IT administrators can perform the first initial copy locally and move the disks to the remote site, thereby avoiding the resource burden generally imposed by the first full data copy. Figure 2. The combination of Dot Hill AssuredCopy, AssuredSnap and AssuredRemote address all the causes of data loss. Data Protection Problems and Solutions Percent Solution Hardware, system malfunction 44% RAID, Mirroring Human error 32% Point in time copies Software program malfunction 14% Point in time copies Computer virus 7% Point in time copies Site Disaster 3% Remote Replication Dot Hill Systems Remote Replication Moving Data Safely Offsite 8

9 Stop Doing Backup! Put Your Storage System to Work for You Are you ready to stop doing backup and start gaining new efficiencies along with better RTO and RPO metrics? With Dot Hill storage you can address data protection and disaster recovery in a simple and elegant fashion -- sans extensive management overhead and resources. Contact us today at or About Dot Hill Offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection, Dot Hill provides responsive and adaptive storage solutions to meet 24/7/365 business demands. With Dot Hill, businesses can proactively safeguard and manage business data, and leverage operational efficiencies to save time, effort and expense today, while meeting the evolving business needs of tomorrow, strategically and cost effectively. Headquartered in Longmont, Colo., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States. For more information, visit us at Copyright Dot Hill Systems, Inc Dot Hill Systems 1351 S. Sunset Street Longmont, CO USA Printed in the USA All Rights Reserved. Dot Hill Systems Stop Doing Backup! Put Your Storage System to Work for You 9