Bangkok--4 Jun--Core & Peak
Whether you work in a large or small organization or you are a home user wanting to secure your hard disk information, securing your precious data assets in today’s world is a must. The perils of data loss loom large. A carefully-planned data protection and back-up policy can avert a major disaster for any organization. Acting before a calamity strikes is a business imperative as Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Management & Data Protection, Asia Pacific, of Hitachi Data Systems explains in the following article.
Data Protection in Asia Pacific
In a recent IDC survey conducted among CIOs in Asia Pacific, when asked “What were the two primary objectives your organization was trying to achieve by implementing a networked storage infrastructure” the top responses were 1) to improve data availability and 2) reduce and centralise backup and recovery. On being asked about the level of importance of your software investment, backup, disaster recovery and archival were rated the highest[1]. In another survey from Gartner, CIO’s were asked the question “has your organization done a major backup/recovery redesign in the past 12 months or plan to do in the next 12?” 50% said they had in the past six months and 66% said they plan to in the next six months[2].
These results demonstrate that managing IT infrastructures and protecting critical business applications has become a tremendous challenge for most organizations, in particular for mid-sized organizations, which lack the budgets and resources to manage highly complex environments. However, the truth is that all enterprise operations are required to achieve minimal downtime and to protect the data assets generated by their business-critical applications.
Common Bottlenecks
Most IT executives have to cope with the difficulty and cost of meeting evolving data protection requirements while managing rapid data growth. Often, the thought of improving your data management and protection processes conjures up images of increasing backup storage, networking devices and data center operations, which are perceived to be expensive propositions.
Some common challenges include:
Backup and Recovery: Unacceptable backup and recovery times are impacting operational efficiency, recovery time objectives and Service Level Agreements (SLA)
Shrinking Backup Windows: A backup window is the time taken by IT administrators to slow down or stop production to perform data recovery operations. In today’s 24/7/forever business, organizations have tightly compressed or eliminated backup windows.
Recovery Time Objective: RTO is the goal (set in time) that an organization sets to fully restore an application with its data when a failure or data loss occurs. Business executives measure this downtime in $ (dollars/cents). There is an expectation about what constitutes a “reasonable” amount of time for recovery. Usually RTOs are established for a particular application type, and this is usually ambitious (due to pressure on the business), and represents a strain on an IT staff.
Recovery Point Objective: This is the point in time at which data is recovered (the time of the last backup). The frequency of the backup is based on the nature of the business — more and more businesses of all sizes cannot afford to lose data, and are ensuring their data is protected.
High operational cost: This occurs primarily due to the complexities and ineffectiveness of disparate systems and fragmented data protection environments. Virtually all IT organizations feel the pressure of too much data and not enough resources to manage and protect it adequately. The expectation is that IT organizations continue to deliver against SLAs that remain constant for data protection, and recovery, while the volume of data grows rapidly. Environments are becoming more complex (e.g., decentralized), and more disparate (businesses sometimes grow through acquisition)—all without a proportional increase in headcount or resources to support evolving requirements.
Compliance mandates: Legal discovery and compliance requires data to be secure, unalterable, and in some cases immediately accessible to comply with a growing number of regulation requirements.
Common Approaches
Tape backups: The premise of traditional storage management solutions that protect data is that by creating copies of date, the threat is minimized. How quickly a copy can be made dictates how often the copies can occur, which in turn dictates the maximum potential data loss. While tape-backups are popular options due to the cost factor, they provide the lowest level of protection and can result in the greatest potential data loss and longest time to restore following a disruption. Many organizations often consider tape-based backup as the only feasible backup solution for remote offices. But tape backup alone is no longer the only cost effective solution and centralized backup solutions offer better choices. Local backups do not protect against any loss that happens outside the data center.
Virtualization: There is no doubt that virtualization solutions can extend a data center beyond the limitations of its physical infrastructure to help reduce hardware and power costs, centralize systems, improve hardware utilization, and maximize available resources. The possible downside of such solutions is evident in the negative impact they have on traditional backup methods, limiting options for recovery and significantly increasing the cost of data protection. If implemented correctly, server virtualization can bring benefits beyond greater utilization of processing power, such as easier backups. However, if server virtualization is done incorrectly, backups can become harder to manage and more expensive.
Deduplication: Deduplication can revolutionize the way you store and protect your data. Data deduplication ensures that only “unique” data is written during the backup process, which means that significantly less disk capacity is needed on the back-end to store changes. However, not all deduplication products deliver a complete solution. Many approaches result in performance bottlenecks, hardware vendor lock-in, incomplete backup workflows, and insufficient data reduction.
Consolidation Delivers the Best Results
Businesses coping with the difficulty and cost of meeting evolving data protection requirements are constantly demanding solutions that are easy to install, integrate and manage on a limited budget. To eliminate the threat of data loss or service disruption and maximizing the return-on-investment at the same time is what CIOs strive to achieve. Given the fact that there exists a myriad of options in the market, the common question is what works best. The answer lies in consolidation as no single product can magically solve the challenges. A holistic approach—that seamlessly integrates virtualization, thin provisioning, deduplication—can significantly augment an organizations’ storage management strategy and accelerate savings.
Just as virtualization allows for consolidation of servers, data protection software focused on consolidation, allows enterprises to consolidate data management across physical and virtual environments to improve data protection, resource utilization and return-on-investment.
Business Challenges that can be addressed through the consolidation approach include:
Inconsistent protection of critical applications: other solutions may leave some applications unprotected because the specific application, platform, or environment is not supported.
Poor performance and unreliability of tape-based backups: rapidly growing amounts of data push tape-based backup environments to their breaking points, especially when data needs to be recovered rapidly.
Escalating cost of managing multiple data protection infrastructures: using multiple disparate products greatly increases implementation, management, and support costs and requires a larger amount of training, internal resources, and computing and storage resources.
Integrated data protection software combing a mix of solutions delivers the following benefits:
Next generation deduplication: Data deduplication accelerates cost savings by not only significantly reducing the amount of physical storage required to maintain data protection environments, but extending its benefits to more devices and data. This allows capabilities such as deduplication to tape, simultaneous support for encryption and performance and scalability. With Next Generation data deduplication built into data protection software, offsite tape storage can be reduced by almost 90%.
Simplified virtual server protection through a unified management of different virtual server environments: This allows for comprehensive data recoverability with reduced effort of deployment and management.
Protection for all data assets, not just the data centre via a software suite that provides a centralized, unified recovery management across geographically dispersed storage systems and tape devices, applications, physical and virtualized environments. With critical data residing in remote or branch offices (ROBOs), reliable protection and the ability to quickly recover data is critical to the business continuity. Centralized and consolidated software delivers a complete solution for ROBO environments, dramatically reducing the cost and operational failures associated with protecting and recovering data at remote or local offices.
Conclusion
Simplicity of use is key in breaking the barriers to a data protection policy. A single product to easily control all aspects of data management for physical and virtual servers, including data protection, archiving, replication and integrated to deliver a complete solution managed from a single console works wonders in the enterprise environment. This unified approach results in an easy, automated, and low cost data management solution, at a fraction of the time, effort and money required by separate point products. This makes data protection a breeze, creating valuable assets for the company.
For more information, please contact;
Srisuput Siangyen
Core & Peak
Tel: 0 2439 4600 ext. 8300
[email protected]
[1] "The Storage Puzzle - Considerations for the Storage Market in Asia Pacific - 2008", IDC survey in October 2008, Survey Sample N=2,200
[2] “User Survey Analysis, Storage Management Software Usage driven by Virtualization, Deduplication and replication”, Gartner survey in September 2008, Alan Dayley, Dave Russell and Carolyn DiCenzo, Survey Sample N=70