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The Emerging Enterprise - Emerging Backup
Emerging Backup
A host of backup solutions have hit the streets in the past 18 months. How can emerging enterprises be sure they're purchasing products that will do the job at hand?
By Lee Keough and Aaron Fischer
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The need to back up data is just as critical at small and midsize companies as it at Fortune 500 organizations. Actually, the need for effective backup may be even greater at emerging enterprises, according to Jack Corrao, VP of marketing at Certance, a market leader in tape backup products and data protection solutions. He notes that many emerging enterprises, particularly smaller companies, are more likely to have less-than-rock-solid "home-brewed" solutions in place. If these companies "lose their contacts, accounts receivable, and accounts payable, they may well have lost the entire business," he says.
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Until about two years ago, smaller companies had pretty much the same backup choices as their larger counterparts: tape and disk. The former requires systems to be taken offline while data is being backed up, leading to concerns about the backup window—the amount of time a company can afford to have its systems out of service. It's no surprise that the phrase "backup window" is typically paired with the modifier "shrinking." Disk-based backup is faster and doesn't require systems to be taken down. But disks are expensive, and they aren't particularly portable. Companies that need or are legally mandated to implement a disaster recovery system—an increasingly common requirement given the U.S. Patriot Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other recent legislation—typically turn to tape, even if they first back up to disk.
Increasing the Options
Over the past 18 months or so, however, a number of backup options have come on the market that target emerging enterprises. One explanation for this proliferation of products is the plummeting price of ATA arrays. Another is the recognition that amid the general economic downturn, the SMB segment is very healthy. According to research done by Certance, 90 percent of business computer sales will come from the SMB segment. There's also the realization that this market is "underserved," says Fred Broussard, a research analyst at IDC (Framingham, MA.).
According to Shane Jackson, director of strategic allegiances of Quantum (San Jose, CA), a manufacturer of easy-to-use, scalable solutions that can be deployed from the desktop to the data center, backup can be seen along a continuum, ranging from tape through a single disk, small or large disk array, and disk-based backup appliances. The latter often use tape emulation to make disks the primary backup target and then migrate data to tape (an approach known as disk to disk to tape, or D2D2T).
"If you are completing your backups well within your available backup window," says Jackson, "and you don't have problems with reliability, retention periods, or restore performance, there's probably no reason to add disk. But if you are continually struggling to complete backups before applications must be made available to your network users or have backup and restore jobs that fail, you probably want to consider a disk-based solution."
Striking a Backup Balance
Deciding on the best approach, indicates Broussard, is a matter of balancing how much data, is being generated against how much downtime a company can safely survive (in other words, how critical is data availability). Price, particularly given the tight budgets at many emerging enterprises, also is a key consideration.
Broussard indicates that company size is not a good gauge of the best approach to take. The requirements of the enterprise have to be evaluated. "If a company has a huge need to have data available all the time," he explains, because it's Web-based or must be up and running 24/7, then disk-based backup should be considered. It's partly a matter of recovery speed; disk-based backup is fast and offers a great deal of capacity. But disks are still expensive.
Tape, on the other hand, is a disaster recovery solution, says Broussard. "If you are not generating business on a Web site, customers don't come to you at all hours," he says. "If it's OK for the system to be out of service for a while, tape could be a good option."
Broussard advises looking at backup "holistically" and factoring in laptop and desktop data protection. He says, "60 percent of all your enterprise data is on the desktop. It must be protected." Software vendors are coming out with a lot more options that address desktop data.
The key, Broussard adds, is for the IT manager to talk to the business unit and get the requirements for data availability before selecting a data protection scheme.
Pricing Protection Out of Reach?
Certance's Corrao agrees with Broussard's characterization of the SMB backup market as being "underserved," though he differs in what he sees as the reason for this situation. The first issue, for Corrao, is price. He notes that many disk-based appliances cost $7,000 or more, while very small enterprises typically can't afford to spend more than $5,000 on a backup solution.
What happens to those company's that can't afford a full-fledged backup and archival system? They take their chances, says Corrao. One way of doing so is to back up solely to ATA disk. Corrao says there is "a myth that backing up to disk is as good as archiving to tape." Unfortunately, the truth becomes apparent if there's fire or some other natural disaster. Tape is still the only medium that is simple to copy and store offsite or in a vault.
Further, when companies mirror their data to disk, they mirror everything—including viruses. With tape, that's not a big deal. If a virus is discovered, it's simply a matter of rolling back to an earlier tape. With disk, all the data can be infected.
Corrao also has encountered another approach to backup that is even more dangerous: using CDs. Again, this scheme is typically limited to small businesses or mobile workers, but in either case it means trouble. The typical CD holds 700 Mbytes of data. When remote workers go to back up their hard drives, they find they can't squeeze everything onto the disk. So they play "Russian roulette," guessing which 700 Mbytes of data they need the most.
Now You CD It, Now You Don't
At very small companies, with 10 to 20 employees, this scheme is even more risky. Backup is usually a task assigned to the employee who is the most technically savvy, which usually means he or she knows the most about PCs. Backing up 20 Gbytes of data, for example, requires 29 CDs. And even the most well-meaning employees simply don't have the time to drag and drop a CD icon that many times.
Corrao also points out that a lack of experience and information also works against small companies. He cites another IT industry myth, that "the size of a backup is equal to your spindle [drive] capacity." What this thinking ignores, though, is how little data out of the overall total actually changes. Instead of treating backup as a one-to-one ratio, he suggests investigating incremental (or "trickle") backup. On the first run, these programs copy all the data. On subsequent runs, they compare files against their database, and only update changes.
Corrao offers a simple definition of what emerging enterprises want from backup and archival solutions: a simple, turnkey solution with a purchase price of $5,000 or less that does one job and does it well.
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