TwinStrata

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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