Way back in the Paleolithic Era, I was among the first hundred or so employees at Cheyenne Software, the originators of the ARCserve backup application. I once heard someone at Cheyenne make this observation: “Everyone has a backup application they hate. It’s usually the one they are using.” The sad thing is, it’s true. I’ve often repeated that line for customers and none have ever disagreed with me. Let’s face it – backup sucks. For Small & Medium Enterprises (or SMEs) this has led to some alarmingly bad practices:
- Backups aren’t completed due to time constraints, or they fail at high rates. It is not unusual to see full backups take longer than the available backup window, and backup logs are often a sad tale of failure after failure.
- Backups aren’t verified or tested for recoverability with any regularity, if at all. For many SMEs the first time a recovery is attempted is when the data requires recovery. This is what is known as “flying without a net”.
- Backups for SMEs are sometimes on consumer-grade media which does not have the use tolerances of commercial-grade media, i.e. the stuff fails too often to be trusted with critical data.
- Offsite storage of backups, if done at all, is often taken very lightly. I recently spoke with a customer who takes his backup media home with him every night. The hair is standing up on the back of my neck as I write this.
The horror goes on and on. As I said, backup sucks. Or at least it did until recently.
The world of data protection has exploded with innovation in recent years. A wide variety of technologies are now available to SMEs, making it amazingly easy to ensure the availability and/or recoverability of data in the event something nasty happens. Instead of plain-vanilla backup to tape there are several classes of data protection technologies which have come to the fore. And oh by the way, you can still backup to tape, just more easily & simply than ever before.
Replication. One of the best ways to ensure data is protected is to make sure it isn’t lost in the first place. How? Replication. Data replication has been around since the early mainframe days, but replication is easier than ever, with more options than ever. Among the vendors on the Southern Data Storage line card are the following replication options:
- Veeam Backup & Replication says it right there in the product name. It offers a flexible, simple way to replicate deduplicated (or “deduped”) backup VMs and data to an alternate system, or alternate site. The deduplication aspect is key because it can help remove the bandwidth constraints that have hampered site-to-site replication in the past. In addition, dedupe reduces the amount of storage necessary to house the data, alleviating another key barrier – the cost of extra storage to house replicated data .
- Nimble Storage offers array-based deduped replication of snapshots which can be scheduled in very tight time increments to reduce the amount of data that could potentially be lost. Replication can be set up with just a few keystrokes and is very flexible.
- Nasuni replication works in a unique way – encrypted file data is replicated to an enterprise-grade online service where the data is replicated several times among the service’s data centers. This ensures the immutability of the data even if something goes wrong at your site AND the online service’s site. Nasuni also has a version control feature which allows for the retrieval of prior versions of files. In fact once data is stored in the Nasuni filer it no longer requires conventional backup.
- Unitrends is a maker of physical and virtual backup appliances, which all include deduped replication as a standard part of the feature set. In addition to a Unitrends-to-Unitrends replication feature, there is also a cloud backup option. Unitrends also offers easy integration with tape and tape libraries.
Coming up in Part 2: How to protect your data by NOT backing it up.