Everythings not lost...

Disaster recovery and remote office replication are fast becoming key issues for IT security professionals. That being the case, it is somewhat ironic that, over time, the most operationally unpredictable and error-prone media for data back-up and recovery (ie tape) has become the primary media deployed in enterprise back-up and disaster recovery.

Indeed, analysts at The Gartner Group estimate that one-in-ten images stored on tape are actually unrecoverable. A 10% failure rate is by far the worst operational dependency in enterprise IT. Yet the majority of enterprises rely on tape as a ‘safeguard’ for their most precious corporate assets.

Using third party trucking services to transport tapes back and forth can be a similarly unreliable process. Might the same flood, power outage or severe weather that takes down your company’s Data Centre make it difficult for trucks to deliver tapes to the same location?

IT security professionals are pretty intelligent individuals, so how did this ostrich-style approach to disaster recovery become the industry standard? Well, tape is cheap and disasters don’t happen every day. Juxtaposed against IT budgets and staffing constraints, tape enabled companies to cost-effectively deploy some form of disaster recovery, and to feel some measure of comfort that in the event of a disaster – the data that was the lifeblood of their organisation still existed and was, to some degree, recoverable. How long to recovery? Hopefully, not too long!

Capacity Optimised Storage

Capacity Optimised Storage (COS) is an emerging category of disk-based back-up and recovery storage solutions that directly addresses the data volume challenge – and the disaster recovery challenge as well. For the first time in decades, it presents a viable alternative to tape back-up, offering superior price performance and far more responsive disaster recovery capabilities.

COS is enabled by de-duplication technology which massively reduces data (by more than 20 times) down to its smallest possible size and into an amount of bytes that can be easily transferred over the network to a disk system in the disaster recovery site. It’s ideally suited to disaster recovery applications. By reducing data volume, de-duplication enables efficient bandwidth use for automatic Wide Area Network (WAN) ‘vaulting’ of back-up data to disaster recovery sites.

As the term implies, WAN vaulting delivers cost-effective off-site storage capacities similar to the physical ‘vault’ where back-up tapes are stored, but with immediate accessibility via the network. By vaulting back-up data across WANs, the operational inefficiencies and risks associated with tape-based disaster recovery are solved easily and effectively as the absolute minimum WAN cost. The local tape auto-loader can simply be replaced with capacity-optimised, disk-based data storage for local recoverability that’s highly reliable.

Back-ups may be replicated to a central hub site (or sites) where a larger system can then store the replica back-up data for several remote offices. Once the data has been written at the hub, it may then be moved on to physical tape – as required – for archiving purposes.

A variety of topologies are in fact very easy to design and deploy once back-up data is reduced via de-duplication and compression technologies for WAN vaulting. Disk-based back-up can then replace tapes and trucks.