It’s the infrastructure

One of the larger investments that IT Managers make in the backup process is not in the backup software and backup hardware but in the infrastructure to support the process. The never-ending increase in the amount of data that has to be protected cast against an ever-tightening backup window has caused a continuous demand for greater performance of the backup servers and more bandwidth from the backup network.

Investment in faster servers and networks is expensive and may be met with a wall. Once the data center is on the fastest network, nothing can be done until an even faster network comes out. This investment in infrastructure is to handle a backup data set that is almost identical to the previous backup. A better approach may be to reduce the backup data set prior to putting it on the network.

Selecting an application that knows how to intelligently use network bandwidth, and backup disk capacity can do this. Some of the best examples of this type of application are ones that can do Block Level Incremental Backups like Syncsort’s Backup Express with their next generation Zero-Impact Dedupe and Multi-Purpose Snapshot architecture.

Reduce network requirements

These products all reduce the investment in network bandwidth by intelligently deciding what components of data should actually be sent across the network to the backup server. This intelligence can reduce costs in a number of areas. First is the obvious prevention of an upgrade to network bandwidth which many data centers are contemplating to reduce backup window times. For many data centers this is followed by implementing 10GB Ethernet or expanding the use of a SAN infrastructure, both of which are expensive, disruptive and unpopular in tough economic times. Dramatically reducing the amount of bandwidth needed by the backup application can postpone or even eliminate the need for investments in these technologies.

Reduce the cost of backup disk investments

Disk as a backup target has or is becoming a key ingredient in improving backup and recovery time and backup and recovery reliability. When it comes to disk purchases, look for a solution that can store data efficiently through the use of Block Level Incremental Backups (BLI) or by way of data deduplication. These technologies allow the disk backup area to store weeks, even months, worth of backup very efficiently by only storing changed segments as opposed to the entire backup.

Be aware that source side deduplication requires significantly more processing resources out of the client side agent. For this expenditure you may increase disk backup efficiency because the data is compared across all the volumes and servers in the backup process. BLI backup on the other hand only compares data at the volume level. When compared with source-side dedupe, this results in a slight reduction in storage efficiency but does so at a dramatic decrease in client side performance impact.

The BLI clients tend to be so efficient that many data centers that use the technology actually run the backup process multiple times throughout the day. Because of the BLI technology in network bandwidth efficiency and backup disk efficiency these users have found that they can use these tools to replace the use of SAN snapshots and bring snapshot like functionality to non-SAN based servers. This technique then lowers cost by eliminating expansion of a SAN just for snapshots and in fact provides greater data safety than does a SAN. It also reduces the costs associated with SAN based snapshots in terms of capacity. Most SANs have to store the snapshotted data on the same primary storage capacity as the actual data. The storage is more expensive on a per GB basis compared to storing this data on the backup disk.

These advantages are detailed in Storage Switzerland’s article BLI Backup vs. SAN Snapshots. Please click below for more details.

With any of the backup software applications which optimize disk capacity, it is important to make sure that it does so without locking you into or out of a particular disk technology. Some software solutions will require that you purchase the disk hardware with the software. This reduces your flexibility and options for saving additional IT budget dollars on the storage hardware. Depending on your needs and the reality of your budget you may want to purchase an off the shelf SATA based array to further keep costs down. The cost savings rendered by selecting your own disk platform may more than cover the costs of the new backup software.

Tape integration

Despite disk’s popularity, tape, especially during the economically challenged year ahead, should continue to play a key role. Despite the continually falling cost of disk, tape maintains a price per TB superiority. Yet many applications or stand alone data deduplication solutions offer no or little direct support of tape. Look for an application that can provide integrated tape support which allows you to only use disk as a short to medium term restoration area. This keeps data close at hand when you need it for recovery but allows you to optimize cost savings of tape as that data ages.

Consolidation of protection strategies

Data protection has evolved well beyond backup; customers are looking to technologies like continuous data protection (CDP) and replication as well as specialty data protection solutions for specific application or environments like Exchange or VMware. Most of these options exist to fill in shortcomings with traditional backup solutions. Taken on a case-by-case basis these solutions may have filed the hole, but unfortunately as more of these point solutions are added they over time become very costly to manage and maintain.

As mentioned earlier, the minimal impact of the BLI client on the server being backed up allows for a near continuous data protection solution, possibly eliminating the need for a CDP solution. With subsequent backups typically taking less than five minutes and a barely measurable impact on the client, running the backup every 30 minutes is very much within the scope of these solutions.

Most replication applications will transmit blocks as they change across a WAN segment directly off the application server. Traditional backup jobs are not replicated because there is too much data written on a nightly basis, hence the need for a separate process. Since these BLI solutions involve block based backups, changes to the backup disk are stored a block at a time, and are very easily replicated. Also the replication occurs from the backup disk not from the actual application host, once again minimizing the impact on performance.

Some of the BLI solutions also eliminate the need for specific application-focused data protection solutions typically available for Exchange, SharePoint or VMware. By leveraging actual image capabilities of some BLI backups these solutions provide the functionality to browse directly into a backup image of an Exchange or SharePoint database. It presented to you through a user interface and allows very simple search and retrieval at very granular message levels in Exchange and Document levels in SharePoint.

The ROI of data protection strategy consolidation is the elimination of additional software licenses and the elimination of a separate process to manage, both of which reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Beyond an insurance policy

The real payoff comes when the solutions can be expanded to not only just lower the cost of the insurance but also to actually provide some functional return on the investment. In this case BLI solutions offer some interesting capabilities.

These solutions work by the first backup creating a complete image backup of each server they are protecting. Then on subsequent backups the backup disk area is snapshotted and only the changed blocks are sent across the network to the backup disk. This gives you a full image of the most recent state of that server and the ability to dial back in time via the use of snapshots. The important capability is that the backup disk is a real browsable file system, not a proprietary blob of data created by the backup software. As mentioned earlier all of this can be done without a SAN.

The backup disk can then be leveraged for a variety of purposes. First the backup images can be snapshotted as a read-write volume and iSCSI mounted to a separate server. This mounted volume can then be utilized for test and development work, report creation or other functions.

The ROI delivered is one of reducing the need to implement an expensive fibre channel SAN, the reduced storage requirements of leveraging the backup copy of data as opposed to having to take the time and extra capacity to copy this data out for these functions.

The right backup solution can reduce the cost of your insurance policy and it can deliver an ROI. The costs associated with building an infrastructure that supports the backup window can begin to dominate the IT budget. Possibly the greatest concern is that these shortcomings are just lived with, backup begins to slip, errors occur and recoveries take too long. The negative expense of not advancing your backup solution to meet the growing demands of the enterprise may be more impactful than any ROI.