Gregory Machler of CSO reports for Network World that a growing trend in disaster recovery for cloud providers is the use of load-balanced data centers instead of hot-cold data centers. A load-balanced data center replaces the data base suffering from a disaster with a similar data center that operates at a reduced capacity.
A challenge when using load-based data centers for disaster recovery in cloud computing is tracking configurations of the infrastructure of an application. Why? Each application creates multiple elements within their environment such as server names, open IP addresses, DNS mappings, firewall rules, SAN and NAS configurations and database clusters just to name a few. Also, not only does an application create these elements but each element can exist for different environments such as production, test and development.
How to mitigate this challenge? Centralization of infrastructure configuration metadata. Centralized parameters and versioning of applications can decrease problems within the load-balanced data center and help to return the data center back to a stable state when disaster or errors have occurred.
In 2011, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could attribute its success to the lagging economy. “Cloud storage systems and services helped users deal with the uncertain economics of 2011 by letting them fund that growth using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one’s own data center,” says Sharon Fisher in her Network Computing article.
The growth in demand for storage has been huge. According to Aberdeen Group, 15% of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80% and 100% annually. And it’s not just organizations that need cloud storage. With digital media files so large in size, consumers are also looking for an online repository for their personal media. This year we’ve seen a variety of cloud service offerings emerge targeting anywhere from the consumer to the large organization.
From a business standpoint, organizations are seeing benefit from cloud storage in a number of ways – to relieve the pressure of escalating IT infrastructure costs and as an effective alternative for disaster recovery.
According to Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm, “SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011.” This is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2015.
A top analyst firm has reported that by 2013 more than 75 percent of large enterprises will make changes to eliminate their outdated and burdensome backup windows. In his article “Redesigning the Data Backup Plan” for Data Center Knowledge, Mike DiMeglio discusses the world of backup, what IT should consider before implementing a new plan, and why disk is the new tape.
Since backup now must do more than “back up”, a data backup plan must provide reliability, recoverability, and value. Backup is no longer just an IT function; it involves every department and should be a corporate-wide effort.
Backup is also painful and despite technological advances, unabated storage growth, required business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and implementation of server virtualization are challenging IT departments to make sure data is backed up and protected. Before implementing new technologies however, the IT team must ensure it will:
• Eliminate current backup pain
• Meet heightened recovery expectations using fewer resources.
• Incorporate adaptability, flexibility, and scalability
• Support development and test environments that require multiple copies of production data.
To be successful, redesigned backup plans must implement a disk-based storage system. Disk increases backup and recovery success rates to 99 percent or more while reducing the associated management time, plus it’s become as affordable and functional as tape.
Many forms of disk-based data protection are available including networked attached storage (NAS) or virtual tape libraries (VTLs). In fact, VTL with deduplication makes the most sense for organizations that currently use tape as their primary backup targets.
Network World had an interesting article titled “9/11: Attacks changed the way companies view IT” by Grant Gross regarding how the 9/11 terrorist attacks and other recent natural disasters have changed the way the IT industry thinks about business continuity and disaster recovery. How so?
Many IT managers prior to 9/11 and coming just off the 1990s Internet boom had never considered the possibility that their entire computing system could be destroyed without warning. In other words, losses of technology and intellectual property on such a large scale were considered unlikely before 9/11.
Today, it is very common to have a mirror of your data center system maintained or your data stored with some geographical separation. The attacks highlighted that a single data center is more vulnerable than backing up data at multiple locations. As an example of this trend, cloud storage remains and is predicted to continue to be a high-growth area in the IT industry in the coming years.
The most fundamental change analysts see is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to not only large corporations and institutions examining their business continuity and disaster recovery and response plans, but also even small and medium-sized business began to identify and invest in disaster recovery. Today, there are recovery products designed specifically with small to medium-sized companies’ needs and budgets in mind.
Symantec just released its predictions for 2011 data storage trends. The conclusion? “Virtualization remains king”.
Virtualization has been one of the biggest IT efficiency trends during the last couple of years. Companies of all sizes are benefiting with virtualization by reducing the number of servers in their environments to gain significant reductions in power consumption, carbon dioxide production and physical footprint. While virtualization decreases server costs and improves ROI, enterprises also are realizing that virtualization increases management attention—and indirectly, costs—due to the new complexity it introduces.
According to Symantec, we will see the following trends emerge in 2011:
More gaps will appear in disaster recovery for virtual environments – With the amount of data in virtual environments and the number of applications growing, there will be an increased need for disaster recovery solutions that protect these applications.
Planning ahead becomes even more important – In the event of a disaster, 60% of an organization’s data stored in virtual environments may not be recoverable because data protection technologies have not been used.
Deleting unimportant data is critical – You can’t be a pack-rat anymore! High levels of data retention are causing storage costs to skyrocket and increasing data recovery time.
Cloud storage will grow up – Expect more sophistication in cloud storage offerings.
Hybrid cloud archiving models will become more common – Enterprises will start using hosted messaging services while keeping their archives on premises to drive down costs.
A choice of options: appliances, hosted services & cloud - 2011 will bring new delivery models in response to the customer need to streamline IT operations.
Consolidation & the next generation data center – Consolidation is top of mind for the IT industry, and enterprises will redefine what their data centers look like in 2011 to reduce costs while protecting data.
Social Media will get even bigger – As companies leverage social media more, IT departments will need to understand how to protect and manage these nonstandard applications for recovery and discovery of business information that is communicated in these outlets.
Evolving Solutions is pleased to share a recent solution success story about a rapidly growing construction and agricultural equipment provider that needed a high performing, flexible datacenter that would expand with them.
Evolving Solutions overhauled the existing datacenter and conducted an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure redesign using JD Edwards ERP software. We helped implement and configure the ERP solution, as well as migrating data from legacy systems.
Evolving Solutions designed a storage infrastructure using the IBM XIV storage system, X86 and IBM system p Bladecenter. This solution sets the company up for uninterrupted growth up to 79 terabytes and can be easily updated if more storage is needed later.
The solution also included virtualization and disaster recovery components. We implemented an IBM System p Blade center appliance, which allows the customer to run five diverse workloads inside a single architecture. Their virtualized environment allows them to move running workloads between servers to maximize availability and avoid downtime, as well as dynamically adjusting server capability to meet changing workload demands.
With the company’s location prone to flooding, backing up files and moving the tapes off-site is extremely important. They cannot risk their data being lost. We therefore implemented a Tivoli Storage Manager disaster recovery solution to act as their insurance policy.
Summary of Benefits
Consolidation – Streamlining and integration of disparate systems
Scalability – Room to grow without having to implement a “forklift upgrade”
Enhanced Performance – Virtualization has increased server utilization
Network Connectivity – Fast and remote access to company data
Cost Savings – Savings in systems maintenance costs following AS400 decommissioning
Managed Services – Scheduled healthchecks to monitor system performance
Data replication involves data being replicated and sent across your Wireless Area Network (WAN) to a remote disaster recovery location. Replication is scheduled for a certain time every day and automatically backed up to your remote server.
Data deduplication is the process of backing up data by eliminating redundancies. With data deduplication, only one unique instance of data is retained, meaning that every subsequent instance of that piece of data is referenced back to the one saved copy.
Data deduplication is beneficial for both replication and tape backup. With replication, it reduces replication time and bandwidth, improving recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) at the disaster recovery site with increased replication frequency. With tape backup, the increase of data retention on disk may result in lower frequency of tape copies and less tapes being stored off-site.
A more sophisticated version of replication is synchronous replication. This is a technique for replicating data between databases (or file systems) where the system being replicated waits for the data to be recorded on the duplicate system before proceeding. The synchronous replication approach requires access to all slave databases and 100% network availability for the replication to be successful. Therefore, network managers have to plan for synchronous replication and ensure that network availability is sufficient.
With synchronous replication, you have the guarantee that the duplicate system has a copy of the data, but the disadvantages that the primary system must wait for the secondary system before proceeding and replication will not be completed without high network availability.
Synchronous replication is currently the most sophisticated and costly form of data backup.
Coming next Wednesday in our Disaster Recovery series: Virtualization.
Tape has been the most common method for backing up data for years, popular because of its relatively low cost. With data security becoming a more pressing concern and the emergence of new disaster recovery concepts, many people are quite rightfully asking whether this is the end of the road for traditional backup and recovery, as we know it.
On-site tape backup is what we would call the “high deductible” insurance plan. Files are backed up to magnetic tape and the tape is stored on-site. This is a riskier insurance plan because it doesn’t protect your data from a physical disaster that destroys your facility. If your data center crashes, your data is backed up and can be restored. If a natural disaster or a fire occurs, however, your data will likely be destroyed.
This is why many companies choose “cold site” tape backup. With this option, your data is backed up to tape and then the tape is trucked to an off-site location, which we call the disaster recovery “cold site”. This offers you an extra layer of protection and the peace of mind that your data will be restored if a disaster hits your physical location.
There are a couple of big down sides to tape backup: security and recovery time. In recent times, tape backup has received some negative press with stories of vanishing data at some of the largest financial institutions.
In addition to the security risk, tape backup is known for its time-consuming and cumbersome recovery process. In many cases, the cost involved in recovering data from tape is so high that it makes more financial sense for a company to purchase new disks for data storage than to restore from tape.
Many companies have turned to a hybrid tape/disk backup solution (D2D2T) where critical data is backed up to disk for rapid restore. For disaster recovery, the critical data can be copied to tape and a second copy produced for off-site storage. Less critical data can be staged to disk and then written directly to tape. D2D2T enables administrators to stage less mission-critical data to tape over time and ensure that critical data is available for a much quicker restore.
With a sharper focus on security and decreasing tolerance for downtime, many organizations are wondering if tape alternatives are better-suited for backup. Of course, these alternatives come at a much higher ticket price.
Check back next Wednesday, April 21st for our next post: Disaster Recovery Options – Data Replication.
Disaster recovery options have, for the most part, remained pretty consistent over the years, with a few new technologies emerging recently. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting a 5 part series of blog posts about disaster recovery strategies to help you choose the best “insurance policy” for your data.
With disaster recovery, it is not a case of one solution fits all. There are several important considerations that dictate how protected your data should be and how much you are willing to spend to ensure this protection.
Key questions that CIOs should ask themselves include:
What kind of data does your organization store?
Does your data require high security storage and transfer?
What impact would the loss of this data have on your business?
How quickly do you need to recover data in the event of a disaster?
What kind of technology can your existing IT infrastructure support?
And, of course, what is your budget?
The answers to these questions will help you determine your disaster recovery requirements in terms of the following key components of a disaster recovery strategy:
Disaster recovery location – In the event of a disaster, where will you conduct business? You need to make provisions so that you are able to continue servicing your customers.
Equipment – In order to recover your lost data, you need equipment on which your data can be restored. One way to plan for this is to store redundant equipment at your DR location.
Connectivity – Depending on the DR technology that you choose, you will need varying levels of network connectivity. Ensure that your network is able to support the amount of connectivity required for backing up and restoring your data.
Recovery Time – You need to determine how much downtime your company can afford. If your tolerance is extremely low, you must ensure that you choose a DR solution that will provide you with the fastest recovery time possible.
Check back on Wednesday April 14th for our next post in this series: Disaster Recovery Options – Tape.
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