Brave New World of Data Backup
By Vincent Ryan
NewsFactor Network
July 01, 2003
Despite the optimistic label "continuous data protection," real-time backup and recovery does not exist today, says Meta Group's Phil Goodwin, and will not arrive until storage virtualization matures -- perhaps in the 2005 to 2006 timeframe.
Improving the process of backing up and restoring data has long been a priority of the IT department. So the fact that not much has changed the past few years makes it seems as though innovation has occurred at a snail's pace. Better manageability, availability, and scalability has seemed a far-off prospect.
But now disk-based backup and other new technology developments are putting some oomph into backup and recovery systems. Large data centers and server colocation sites, in particular, are likely to take advantage of the latest offerings. Tape systems are becoming increasingly cumbersome for handling massive data-backup requirements, and disk replication now enables services like offsite storage.
Pain Point
Backup and recovery is the number one pain point in any data-storage organization, Phil Goodwin, senior program director at Meta Group, told NewsFactor, and will be a key spending area for organizations this year and next. He estimates that roughly 60 to 70 percent of the effort associated with storage management is the function of backup and recovery.
The majority of organizations still use tape backup systems and probably will for some time, Goodwin said. But backup and recovery as it is known today will be obsolete in the next 24 months, Goodwin said. That's because tape-based systems will be supplemented by disk-based replication, which will become the main recovery mechanism for enterprises.
"Snapshots" or "mirrors" take a logical copy of the data and store it on disk. Data recovery is much faster, as is backing up, which encourages more frequent backups. "The time for data recovery really is becoming a ridiculous notion," Goodwin said. "The downtime is so high that even though disk-based recovery is more expensive it can save a considerable amount of money."
Additionally, as disk drives -- particularly ATA devices -- get cheaper, more organizations will move to disk-based backup.
Data Center Needs
But according to Craig Hurley, managed storage product manager at Verio, tape definitely is still the preferred method for customers whose servers reside in data centers. "A few years ago, the average customer didn't think of ordering tape backup," Hurley told NewsFactor. "Today, most customers come to us expecting tape backup to be bundled in."
Many organizations now want "hot" database backups, which work while the database is still running. "Most customers cannot afford to shut down their database," Hurley said. Verio provides online database backups via Veritas Net Backup agents -- a customized piece of software written to the application API that has the ability to put applications in backup mode and still make them available to the end user.
Companies also are showing greater interest in data-replication services, Hurley said, which allow their data to reside at more than one Verio site. "Enterprise customers want to ensure that their data is stored offsite, and that they have access to stored data in real time or near real time," he noted.
To accomplish that goal, Verio uses Veritas Volume Replicator, which enables an organization to take continuous or "point in time" copies of data and replicate it over a wide area network. Using replication lets organizations not only provide for disaster recovery in case of site failure, but also eliminate administrative overhead for running tape systems at remote offices, Scott Kosciuk, product marketing manager for Veritas Software, told NewsFactor.
Continuous Backup
Although efficient, disk replication still requires the IT organization to run a batch backup job at a certain point in time, Mark Lewis, product manager for StorageTek, told NewsFactor. The "risk window" -- the time between when data is written and when it is first protected -- still exists. And it "tends to be expensive if you replicate data over and over again," Lewis said.
Two months ago, StorageTek introduced EchoView, a backup device that may be the future of data backup and recovery. Touted as "continuous data protection," EchoView uses a small device driver to record every time a "write" action occurs and send a copy of that write across the network to the disk-based backup appliance. EchoView continuously captures and journals changed data and offers recovery to any point in time existing in the journal, Lewis said.
The device driver is designed to be light and non-intrusive at the client level, Lewis said. "We've seen less than 5 percent system overhead. It's something that quietly sits in the background."
EchoView was introduced as a department-size solution, but later on will be scaled to tens of terabytes and include large-scale enterprise needs, such as fibre channel, he said.
Despite the optimistic label "continuous data protection," real-time backup and recovery does not exist today, Goodwin says, and will not arrive until storage virtualization matures -- perhaps in the 2005 to 2006 timeframe. Storage virtualization is the ability to manage a heterogeneous pool of storage as a single entity by policy, Goodwin said.
"The whole notion of scheduling a backup will be obsolete," he precits. "But it requires a whole new suite of software."
Tandem Team
Although disk-based backup will continue to make inroads into tape's territory, most organizations will use it as an adjunct for tape rather than a replacement. As vendors introduce cheaper disk arrays, many will use "staging to disk," where disk storage is used for a couple of months and then the data is moved to tape for long-term storage, Veritas' Kosciuk said. Another reason tape will continue to be used is because it enables data that is not replicated to disk to be stored offsite, he said.
What tape also provides is a "physical break" in the chain when data protection is a concern, Goodwin said. A disk-based replication system, because it is automated, can open the door to a virus or other outside attack permeating the entire system. But there would be no way to propagate such a corruption onto a tape drive, Goodwin said. Disk may be the future, but tape is here to stay.
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