The Evolution of Backup

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1 Solution Brief Once, in some long-forgotten era, data storage was simple. Or, simply put, there was only one way to protect data: magnetic tape. More than half a century ago, when backup technology was in its infancy, tape offered the singular method for making copies of electronic information. Dating back to the 1950s, you d expect tape to have long gone the way of drive-ins and sock hops. After all, in that era, a terabyte of data wasn t even a glint in a computer geek s eye. It even predated the term, computer geek. Despite expectations, when it comes to data protection, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Technology news sources continue to cite the use of tape by more than 70% of businesses as part of their overall backup strategy. 1 It takes a bit of digging to unearth the reasons why, and moreover, to understand where data protection is headed these days. 1

2 2 Unitrends offers a solid solution to server protection that requires less administration, but all of the features of much more expensive products. David Kennedy Financial Asset Management Systems We pointed it to the cluster IP, and it found the VMs. I chose the ones to backup, set the backup preferences and away we went. Erik Sheldon KSBJ and NGEN Radio The Dawn of Data Protection The basic strategy for preserving data started out as a simple, two-fold intention: 1. Create a backup, or provide a way to copy information from the source where it resides for normal operations, to a backup target, where it remains for either a defined or an indefinite period. 2. Enable recovery, or provide a means to restore backed up information to an easily accessed destination. For businesses, this basic strategy serves two distinct purposes. First, it seeks to preserve copies of data for restoration in the event of loss. It also provide a means for storing older data according to an organization s data retention policy. This older data generally resides beyond immediate access. Over time and particularly over the last two decades changes in both the technologies protected and those technologies providing protection have complicated data storage. Factors influencing backup and recovery include: Storage Destinations. Where data gets stored both historically and currently includes tape, disk, optical, and online/remote. Storage Methods. These range from unstructured storage to system imaging, and include incremental, differential, and continuous backup technologies. Optimization Technologies. These include compression, deduplication, duplication, and encryption. Divergent Strategies Hardware, software, and cloud offer varied answers, but also more questions about how best to protect enterprise data. Support for Virtualization. Technologies such as VMware and Hyper-V provide a software platform that executes programs as if it were a physical machine, stretching resource dollars, but also complicating data protection strategies. RPO and RTO. Backup and recovery planning typically addresses two distinct measurements that help to define data recovery: RPO and RTO, or recovery point objective and recovery time objective.

3 3 The backups are done in real-time without affecting the availability or performance of the credit union s online banking services. Jackie Miller 360 Federal Credit Union Storage Destinations From the dawn of the data storage era, the storage type defined the approach, making it a good place to begin digging to unearth some facts about backup and recovery, then-to-now. In the event of a major incident at our Toronto facility we can use the data from the remote appliance to quickly rebuild servers, or even power up server images directly on the appliance to get everything back online within hours. Baltazar Palha CSA Transportation Magnetic Tape. In the 70s, about twenty years into its use, magnetic tape as a backup solution proved costly, and had evolved into somewhat of a management nuisance. As it became more cost effective in the 80s, though, tape was once again regarded as suitable for keeping pace with data storage needs. At the time, it seemed satisfactory as a sequential access medium, writing data quickly enough. A few years later, however, tape again lost ground in terms of streaming, tending to start and stop because it couldn t keep up with data rates as these increased. Adding another tape drive caused alignment problems when using one tape drive to write data and another to read it. And, as an overriding downside, decade after decade: there is no easy way to locate particular sets of data when it comes to restoring from tape. Maintaining backup tapes as data multiplies requires rotating them and moving them off-site to ensure preservation, complicating the strategy. Regardless of its many challenges, though, tape remains a part of at least 50% or more of all businesses backup strategies, with a wave of new tape formats between further entrenching this outdated solution to data protection in the business world. Hard Disk. Also described as D2D (disk-to-disk), this backup option first appeared in the 70s, providing superior reliability compared to tape. With improved access, availability, and capacity, hard disks provided advantages tape backup couldn t deliver. It also enabled high-performance connectivity

4 4 Even as our Sheriff s office continues to store an increasing amount of large image data, I know our Unitrends solution has the capacity and reliability to handle it all. Suzanne Horton Tioga County Backup systems need to simply work and be simple to manage. Michael Sodolak KBA North America over varied distances through SCSI, USB, FireWire, esata, Ethernet, iscsi, and Fibre Channel. The downside: Despite savings on operational expenses and an increase in reliability, the price per gigabyte for disk drives dilutes their viability for businesses with growing data stores. With costs to purchase and support software to manage those backups, D2D replaced the set of challenges posed by tape backup with other, equally frustrating challenges of its own. Optical and RAID. The next backup technology wave brought with it CDs and DVDs, replacing tape with a slightly more reliable, inexpensive yet portable medium. RAID archival also emerged, further increasing reliability while improving on standard hard disk technology with network-attached storage (NAS) for file-level, and storage-area networks (SAN) for block-level network storage to dedicated devices. Online (Cloud). While on-site backups allow for immediate access and retrieval of lost data, off-site backups provide the best protection from disasters such as fire, flood, or earthquake. As businesses began to understand the necessity of combining both worlds, improved broadband internet access ushered in the advent of remote backup services. Still, transmitting large amounts of data over the Internet results in much slower backup rates than backing up the same amount of data to local storage. Even an expensive, fully-provisioned, telephony-grade, symmetric 1.5Mbps WAN connection to a backup store would require from days to upload or download a single terabyte of data, unacceptable for any business that doesn t favor the thought of extinction. Combining cloud-based backup and on-premise backup offers the best of local backup and recovery strategy. Holding down the cost of this mix, however, can pose a major barrier to adoption. Storage Methods Aside from storage type, it makes sense to take a look at the means that have evolved and added complexity to data storage. Unstructured. At a basic level, tapes and optical storage (CDs, DVDs) fall within this category of storage technologies. Unstructured media requires labeling and physical safekeeping, and affords the most rudimentary means for managing data storage. System Imaging. System images record complete snapshots of a server configuration at a given point in time. The practice of system imaging arose as a way to deploy a standard configuration to other systems, and has since evolved into a means for creating ongoing backups of those systems. Both SAN (block-level) and NAS (file-level) technologies helped to pave the way for improved backup management through snapshots, though these don t provide the best method for absolute preservation of data. They can, however, improve RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and, coupled with disk-to-disk (D2D), offer a better approach in terms of physical failure and data retention. D2D and thus DAS (Direct

5 5 We did a bare metal recovery to that server. We ve done that at least twice in the span of a couple of weeks. And, it was fun, easy and fast. Rod Smith Griffin-Spalding County School System Unitrends potentially saved us many hours of manpower and capital, or rather it will if/when that VM crashes. Eric Hagen Selectron Technologies Attached Storage) can also offer a cheaper storage solution than dedicating expensive SAN capacity to snapshots. Differential. A differential backup saves all data since the last full backup. As data changes and typically increases, so does the time to perform the backup, known as the backup window. Differential backup includes a full backup and, thereafter, complete backups of all the changes since the last full backup. Restoring an entire system to a certain point in time using differential backup requires the last full backup prior to loss/failure plus the latest differential backup since that last full backup. Incremental. An incremental backup improves on the differential backup scenario, storing only increments of change between two points in time and eliminating duplicate stores of unchanged data that result from repeated full backups. Incremental backups include a full backup and, thereafter, any number of incremental backups created from changed data only. Restore would then include the most recent full backup prior to data loss, plus each incremental backup from the full backup up to the point in time of loss/ failure. Optimization Technologies As data stores have grown and technologies have changed, so storage complexity has increased. Subsequently, diverse technologies have emerged to enable the best possible result in backup and recovery. Each of these technologies enhances some aspect of data protection; combining them all can be tricky, but beneficial, if done correctly. Replication. The logical synchronization used to achieve backup can occur in one of two ways. Array-based replication requires purchase of more and more physical storage as your data stores grow. Host-based replication uses software residing on the source computer, copying data from that source to a target computer. This operation places an extreme load on the source computer, however, and requires significant bandwidth that results in network latency. Compression. The use of any of various compresson schemes allows a reduction in the size of the source data so that it uses less storage space. Compression is frequently a built-in feature of tape drive hardware. Deduplication. Backup of similar systems to the same destination storage device creates the potential for many duplicate data sets. For instance, a group of Windows workstations may contain the same system information and client-side applications. Since the data repository needs only one copy of these applications and system files for recovery, it makes sense to perform deduplication. File- and block-level deduplication help save backup space by storing only unique data. Deduplication on the source server, before moving data called source/client side deduplication reduces backup bandwidth. Deduplication once data has moved to the target storage is called inline or back-end deduplication. Byte-level deduplication combines the resource efficiency of file-level deduplication with the data reduction effectiveness of block-level

6 6 During our busy season we cannot afford any downtime. This solution keeps our business running, no matter what happens. Luke Simpson Ward & Uptigrove deduplication. Content aware, or byte-level deduplication uses content recognition to optimize data reduction with fewer resources. Duplication. Sometimes backups are duplicated to a second set of storage media. This allows rearrangement of those backup images to optimize restore speed or to store a second copy at a different location or on a different storage medium. Encryption. Encryption uses pattern recognition to safeguard data from unauthorized access during network transit, or if a system (such as a laptop) is stolen. On the downside, encrypted data can slow down backup speeds, and it works counter to deduplication and compression, both of which seek to trim the amount of information you back up by reducing patterns in that data. RPO and RTO One other optimization technique, mentioned earlier, deserves a bit more attention: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is a measure of data loss tolerance, translating to work you will need to recreate in the event of loss. RTO is the time lapse acceptable before employees begin working again after a disruption. Backup Restore Recovery Point Objective Recovery Time Objective Weeks Days Hours Minutes Minutes Hours Days Weeks Seconds Productivity Loss = RPO + RTO Cost = Productivity Loss x Total Hourly Rate of Effected Employees When loss occurs, data is not the only consideration; you first need to recover the systems you use to contain data. The best way to do this is through a recovery technique called bare metal recovery. A bare metal restore rebuilds a system quickly, recovering to designated hardware not only files, but operating systems, applications, data components and settings. Even better, dissimilar bare metal recovery lets you restore across varied systems, from physical-to-physical (P2P), virtual-to-physical (V2P), and physical-to-virtual (P2V). With bare metal recovery, you restore not only files, but operating systems, applications, data components and settings to a separate piece of hardware. Next, you want to align your RPO with your desired retention, making sure your data protection solution supports diverse technologies previously mentioned, such as system imaging and replication. This will allow you full protection against both logical and physical failure by duplicating the right sets of data from your primary storage device. And RPO can vary, depending on types of data. Databases and require faster RPO than file systems, while the different systems containing that data may have different RPOs, too.

7 7 Finally, you ll want to balance RPO and RTO for all your technology assets, including notebooks, workstations, and PCs, all of which contain valuable data that equate with time and money. Support for Virtualization Over the last decade, server virtualization has spread across technology environments as a way to stretch resources. Virtualization partitions physical servers into individual, simulated servers that share the same physical resources. Though virtualization adds more bang for the buck, it also produces yet another layer of complexity to the evolving technology landscape, particularly when it comes to data protection. And, for those businesses who still use tapes for data protection, virtual machines (VMs) cannot back up to tape. In the case of agent-based backup, an agent you install in a VM streams its data to the backup target. Agentless backup software communicates with associated VM APIs to prepare data for backup. These APIs snap the volume and send that snapshot to the backup target. Depending on platform, VM environments can include varied hypervisors, and further, require monitoring and maintenance. Most businesses won t adopt a 100% virtualization strategy; more likely, they will continue to mix both traditional with varied virtual implementations. In that case, a heterogeneous, bare metal recovery solution offers the best means for data restoration, whatever your VMs, agent-based or agentless. Divergent Strategies In all, there are three distinct means for managing data storage. These are: hardware-based, software-based, or cloud. Each provides specific advantages and disadvantages of its own. Hardware-centered backup can offer built-in optimization features, but can also be costly, based on price of storage medium. Software might be cheap, but it s no quick fix. You ll likely find yourself investing in a dedicated server, OS, storage controller, and lots of backup space. You may even need to upgrade your network to handle the added traffic generated by some solutions. Cloud solutions provide the low cost of pooled resources, but their interminable recovery rates leave you unprepared for common data loss occurences such as deleted files or system failures. The ideal solution would combine the best of all three worlds...

8 8 Fully Adapted All the complexity of today s heterogeneous technology environment calls for one thing: A holistic approach. So let s take one step further into today s data protection era. What would that step look like? Three words: Heterogeneity. Scalability. Flexibility. Here s how Unitrends delivers all three: We blend core optimization features into our appliances, featuring adaptive, byte-level deduplication and AES-256 encryption. We scale our solutions simply, with a No Limits Licensing scheme that does away with the idea of peranything fees. We offer world-class RPO to the tune of backups every 60 seconds, and near-continuous data protection, with 10,000 snapshots a week. We provide single-tenant and multi-tenant replication for both private cloud and our public cloud Vault2Cloud service. We wrap it all up with standard, proactive support that includes phone, , and online chat, certified by our 98%+ customer satisfaction rating. Let Unitrends help you evolve your backup and recovery strategy. About Unitrends Unitrends delivers award-winning business recovery solutions for any IT environment. The company s portfolio of virtual, physical and cloud solutions provides adaptive protection for organizations globally. To address the complexities facing today s modern data center, Unitrends delivers end-to-end protection and instant recovery of all virtual and physical assets as well as automated disaster recovery testing built for virtualization. With the industry s lowest total cost of ownership, Unitrends offerings are backed by a customer support team that consistently achieves a 98 percent satisfaction rating. Visit. Ready to see Unitrends in action? Watch us crash a server and restore it: /product-demo