Did someone finally get backup right?
Backup isn’t a ‘production’ application that generates revenue for the company, it’s a housekeeping task (albeit, an important one) with the sole purpose of providing restores of data in acceptable timeframes. Backup is an expense to be minimized. There’s an old saying; “The best way to improve backup is to do less of it”. How true.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
A backup system has historically been a CapEx solution, one that required buying a complicated piece of software and a complex mechanical device (tape library) and paying someone to put the whole thing together. Then there’s the question of DR, which usually meant creating off-site copies of backup tapes and calling an off-site tape storage facility.
When a restore was needed, especially more than a few files, IT held its breath while the tape(s) were located and replayed. Failure rates for tape based backups were far too high and restores often took hours, since they might be coming from many different tapes - or from off site.
Then, when there was a system problem, the user could get bounced back and forth from hardware supplier to software supplier, as no one took ‘system responsibility’. For a large company with a large IT staff, backup is a necessary evil something to be endured.
But for the small to medium business (SMB), backups are another matter altogether. Typically, the smaller the company, the thinner the IT experience and resources. Tasks like backup, which aren’t part of the daily production workflow, can be neglected - especially as data and applications grow. For the SMB, restores could be the nightmare scenario, as the company learned the files they needed to restore were part of a missed backup.
Disk backup has helped this, somewhat, as it has eliminated issues of tape failure and some of the issues of restore times. Deduplication has enabled users to save more backups on the same appliance, in the same overall ‘space’. But backup still requires a complicated software application and the matter of purchasing, implementing and supporting a multi-vendor system - plus DR. For a small to medium sized business, there’s still no happiness, as they’re stuck with the care and feeding of a complex system.
For a housekeeping task such as this, what’s needed is an OpEx solution, one that’s paid for monthly and doesn’t involve any system integration. What’s more, the solution should leverage current cloud technologies to provide an off-site copy of backups and a long term archive.
Enter hybrid cloud based backups like those offered by Axcient. These backup (and restore) solutions might be perfect for the small to medium-sized businesses - or for any organization that just doesn’t want to deal with a backup system. For a monthly fee, Hybrid Cloud Backup providers put a disk backup device on-site which collects regular backups of application and file system data. Then, it does a difference-based replication of this local data back to their remote data center. There’s no backup software to buy (look for software that requires no agents be installed on client servers), no hardware to buy and nothing to integrate, install or support.
When a restore is needed, data that’s still local is reproduced in seconds. Since the vast majority of restores come from recent backups, this covers most restores. For the occasional restore that’s been sent off-site, these files can be pulled back over the internet. They should also have a long-term archive and DR solution, enabled by the same technology.
Hybrid cloud based backup has reduced backup to the monthly utility bill it should be yet still keeping the latest copy of data local for fast recoveries.
Eric Slack, Senior Analyst
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