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Tags: backup, backup to cloud, cloud backup, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, CloudArray, data protection, online backup, TwinStrata, vmware
Posted in Intelligent Storage Cloud, backup, replication | 1 Comment »

Business Continuity Using the Cloud

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

I ran across an interesting, albeit brief article that discusses a recent IDC report on business continuity in the cloud. While words such as “nascent” and “untapped” appear in the article to describe business continuity in the cloud, we at TwinStrata have been busily making this a reality.

We regularly see a number of mid-size businesses that store all of their primary data at a single location, with perhaps tape backups or online backups stored off-site for disaster purposes. A looming question for many of these businesses is what happens if a disaster strikes resulting in data loss at a primary location and how quickly can business applications get back up and running. If the answer is days to weeks, as experienced recently by the state of Virginia, the business may suffer significant monetary losses, irrepairable harm or even effectively close.

Disaster planning can often help IT administrators mitigate the risk of long outages by quantifying Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), or how long it takes to get application back up and running before disaster strikes. It also help quantify Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), representing the amount of data loss that can be tolerated often measured in time. Disaster planning can also highlight the perils of typical off-site data protection, such as:

1) the fact that tape backups fail 60% of the time on average, but are rarely checked, resulting in rolling back to much older copies of data than anticipated (or none at all)
2) the fact that there is significant time required to go from a tape to restored data and running applications
3) the fact that it may take days to restore an online backup over the network

So what can be done aside from setting up a standby recovery site with dedicated hardware and infrastructure, often at prohibitive cost?

Moving your backups to the cloud is a good first step. It avoids the issues of tape altogether, making it easier to spot check backups to ensure they are correct and consistent. With products such as CloudArray that offer a virtual appliance that runs in the cloud (that may be used in tandem with your virtual or physical appliance on premise), it means your data can be recovered rapidly from a cloud compute site local to your cloud storage provider. Finally, it opens the possibility of standing up your applications in the cloud as part of a full business continuity solution. Think about an off-site business continuity strategy with on-demand compute and storage resources. The future may be a lot closer than you think…

Stay tuned as we’ll have a lot more to say on this topic in upcoming posts.

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Tags: backup, backup to cloud, business applications, business continuity, Cloud compute, cloud computing, Cloud Storage, CloudArray, data protection, disaster recovery
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SMEs: Keep your head in the clouds, especially for off-site data protection

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Since joining TwinStrata, it’s given me a refreshing new perspective about the potential for SME type companies to adopt and use storage in the cloud. It makes sense when you think about how these companies regularly deal with limited resources and technology challenges while trying to manage revenue growth and stay competitive. So how and where do they get started? What could drive SMEs more to the cloud is having a solution that makes the decision to utilize cloud storage simpler – for some things anyway – and which could yield immediate cost savings and efficiencies. Using storage in the cloud for off-site data protection purposes is a good place to start. Some of the more obvious reasons include: eliminating the need for cumbersome tape operations, faster recovery times, reduced tier 2 storage purchases, lowered storage management costs, and streamlining IT operations. But there are other reasons as well that may not be as obvious. Having an affordable and innovative solution that delivers enterprise class offsite data protection with performance and reliability capabilities will further help SME’s to consider cloud storage for these reasons as well:

Two-Site DR: It’s expensive to have a second site for DR purposes so having your data stored in the cloud can provide smaller and medium sized companies with instant, optimized, and low cost second-site disaster recovery capabilities. And if the solution is flexible enough, then you can also select from alternative DR methods that helps to improve overall DR readiness with a direct disk to cloud architecture.
Security and Compliance: Any business that hands off their data to someone else will want to know how secure their data will be. However, it may not be good enough to just secure data at rest while at the cloud storage provider site. An optimized solution will also secure the data while in-flight providing an added level of security.
Investment protection: Once on-site backup software is configured and regularly operating, the last thing IT wants is something that will cause a disruption to data protection operations or introduce another layer of complexity in order to extend the backup process off-site. Off-site data protection solutions that can enable transparency through seamless and non-intrusive interoperability with existing backup operations, work with different backup products, and automate off-site data protection and DR operations will be much more attractive to IT organizations already strapped by resource constraints.
Choice of cloud storage provider: All cloud storage providers offer something a little different and because they do it may require companies to create special APIs in order to connect to them. This also has a tendency to “lock” you into the storage provider when you may want choice as part of your strategy. The solution that can provide you with a wide array of integration choices relative to server support, virtualization software, back-up tools, and back-end cloud storage providers will prove best for companies reaching to the clouds for affordable, on-demand/pay-as-you-go capacity expansion, and compute anywhere accessibility.

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Tags: backup to cloud, Cloud Services, data protection, storage as a service, TwinStrata
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Data Protection with Cloud Storage: B2D2C is easy and affordable

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

by Greg Roody

Data Protection is a natural fit for cloud Storage since it affords you a low cost, offsite, service oriented storage model for a function that is critical to your business.

Data Protection isn’t a complex operation. It’s the process of ensuring that applications and servers can be restored in the case of a failure or loss of some kind. Backup is a good example of a typical DP application, but certainly not the only one. DP is a lot of things, risk reduction, securing your assets, business continuity and disaster restart.

But at its core, DP is about Continuance, Restart, and Recovery; not backup.

Traditionally, backups are spun to tape, and then shipped to offsite storage for safe keeping. Tape is well known and understood, but has a lot of drawbacks.

First, it’s a serial media. You physically have to advance the tape to a specific location to begin to read off data you are looking for, so restore operations can be slow. That’s assuming the tape is even readable (studies have claimed up to a 40% read error rate)); if either the index or data segment you are looking for is corrupt, you won’t be able to restore the data.

And of course, someone has to find the correct tape at the offsite storage location (remember the Iron Mountain tape losses?) and then ship them back to you. All of this elongates the recovery process and increases risk and expense.

A better way – B2D

In more advanced environments, customers will use a backup to disk (B2D) or B2D2T process in place of traditional tape backups. This has several advantages, first, since the data you want to recover is online, it is extremely easy to find and restore just the data you are looking for. Secondly, it is far more reliable than tape. A 1 in 3 or even 1 in 10 chance of not being able to restore the data you need from tape is not a very good metric.

But B2D alone also has disadvantages. First, it’s a local solution only. Unless you replicate that disk (very expensive since you need infrastructure in two data centers), you have no offsite copy of your data. B2D2T is an alternative here, you gain the benefits of short term storage on disk and long term archival offsite, but you are still burdened with the expenses and unreliability associated with tape.

B2D is Good, B2D2C is better

If you could extend your B2D solution to offer low cost, secure, and reliable, offsite storage at the same time, that would be the best of both worlds. And in fact, B2D combined with CloudArray from TwinStrata enables you to do just that.

With fully cached volumes, you not only have a local copy of your disk based backups, but you gain an automatic offsite copy at your Cloud Storage Provider (public or private). Of course it’s secure as well.

Even Better, you already have the Backup Software

Chances are, whatever backup product you are currently using to write to tape can be used to write to CloudArray storage volumes (and ultimately to the Cloud). Almost every major backup application vendor now supports a B2D option in their software, and most will run concurrently with local tape operations. You may have to upgrade to a later version of their product, but you won’t have to rip and replace your current backup solution.

Adding the Cloud component is easy

To configure the two to work together, all you would need to do is create a local CloudArray volume and mount it to your backup server. The backup application can then be configured to write to this volume just like it would any local volume, and CloudArray will then copy that data safely to your Cloud Storage Provider.

If a restore becomes necessary, it would be serviced directly from the local cache, and you wouldn’t need to go out to the cloud at all. Since CloudArray cache is persistent and can be dedicated to specific volumes, there is no risk that your backup data would be flushed out by another more active volume.

In the event of a local site disruption, the Cloud resident backups could be restored to any location of your choice, even a Cloud Computing environment such as Amazon EC2.

Data Protection is about Recovery. Reducing risk, and decreasing costs. It isn’t about doing unnatural acts with Robocopy because that is the only tool that will work with your gateway software.

CloudArray can be used today with leading backup application products such as Net Backup, Backup Exec, Veeam, Visioncore, and a host of others. Visit www.TwinStrata.com for a free trial.

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