Enterprise Backup design and management has always been one of the least favorite tasks in the data center, and it doesn’t look to get any more popular because the backup environment keeps getting more complex. Almost every enterprise of any size has more than two backup applications, plus other data protection workloads, such as replication.

While more copies of data are available than ever, the challenge is knowing which copy is the right one when data needs to be restored. This proliferation of backup solutions is compounded by a lack of centralized management, leading to overprotected applications, unprotected applications and repeated restore mistakes.

The typical reaction to this challenge is to try to consolidate the entire backup process into a single application. The problem with these consolidation projects is that they seldom accomplish their primary goal, unifying data protection. And in most cases, as the consolidated backup application is being deployed, exceptions arise which undermine the unification effort. One is when the business-line managers want their data protected by the backup software that comes with that application, not by the centralized system. Another is when the administrator of a particular application or environment wants to take advantage of features only available in other software, not in the enterprise application.

Even if the consolidation effort is successful in unifying the backup environment initially, splinters eventually arise. The most recent example is the server virtualization project. Large software applications with millions of lines of code, like virtualization platforms, have to be updated slowly. It’s easier to create a point-specific solution than to modify one of these enterprise products. As a result, early backup of the virtual server infrastructure was often provided by solutions like Quest vRanger, solutions which only arrived on the market within the past five or ten years. They were adopted because they provided the required baseline of protection and they were usually the first to take advantage of specific backup hooks provided by the virtual environment.

The result was that many environments ended up with a specialized, stand-alone application for backing up the virtual environment and then still others for their enterprise applications in the physical environment. As virtualization progressed from the early implementation phase to become a standard in the data center, a more robust data protection structure was required. Some of the point solutions matured to keep up, others did not. Enterprises were faced with the challenge of moving the virtual environment back to their original backup applications or investing in a new enterprise backup application altogether.

Now, it’s likely that history will repeat itself. A new initiative will occur in the data center that will require a unique data protection perspective. Companies like Quest are showing foresight by making sure that future backup applications can be integrated into a single umbrella application.

In addition to the software consolidation issues, there are also hardware integration concerns. Over the past ten years, the data protection process has moved from one that was dominated by tape to one that’s mostly disk and augmented by tape. Now the cloud is a popular target for backup jobs. The hardware is also providing more services than it did before, like deduplication, replication and data integrity checking. Once again, all of these processes need to be separately managed and monitored.

Additionally, software that was created in the last few years often doesn’t have support for legacy backup hardware. For example, many VMware data protection products do not have direct support for back up to a tape-based device; they mostly back up to disk. Tape continues to be an important part of enterprise data protection and as these point products are consolidated they need to support this legacy infrastructure.

To further complicate matters, many of these smaller companies were acquired by more established suppliers. While there was usually an implied message that “integration will come”, in most cases it has not. 

The Solution to the Enterprise Backup Problem

Most data protection vendors are either a point solutions provider that only has one software application or a large software provider with multiple backup solutions. Each vendor is going to need to deal with the challenge of too much segmentation in the market. They are going to need to provide their customers, the IT Backup Manager(s), with a way to centralize the monitoring and interacting with the various backup applications in the enterprise. This is more than just providing a global reporting tool. While these are helpful, the backup manager still has to drill into the GUI of each particular application to do routine tasks.

An ideal solution would be for the data protection vendors to create a centralized console that connects directly to their backup applications. This console could provide a central view and centralized control over backup schedules, protected resources and available backup target devices.

This type of product should then allow for other products, either through partnership or acquisition to be “snapped in” so that they too could have their control and operation centralized. With this type of capability, sub-market products could be allowed to grow to maturity and have data protection solutions customized for those markets. Then they could be integrated into the enterprise backup application when the time is right.

Integration or Modularization?

Despite conventional wisdom, the enterprise does not need integration; it needs applications that have been modularized so that they can plug into these architectures. The unique part of most data protection solutions is how they interface with the applications and files systems that they are backing up. The rest of each data protection application is fairly common; it requires a scheduler, a library of which files have been protected, how many times and when. The application must also map each interface to some sort of storage device.

The ideal solution would be able to make this connection for the application and user, providing a common interface between the common functions. For the foreseeable future, those functions will be simply adjusted by the centralized console described above. Potentially in the future new backup software developers could write specifically to this console so that they don’t have to “re-invent the wheel” and create their own scheduler, index manager and device drivers.

Summary

Consolidation around a single backup application is a goal that most enterprises will never see. Vendors need to be realistic and understand that no single backup application will be able to support every environment to its fullest capabilities at all times. A more modular approach to data protection with connections to a centralized console provides the best of both worlds. It allows users to meet their specific data protection needs and allows vendors to focus solely on meeting those needs.

This article sponsored by Quest Software, find out why on June 5, 2012

Quest Software is a client of Storage Switzerland

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