EDITOR’S NOTE BACKUP IN 2015: CONVERGENCE WITH DR, ARCHIVE, FILE SYNC/SHARE

MODERN BACKUP STILL EVOLVING

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Modern Data Protection Is More Than BackupBackup is evolving as it converges with formerly distinct disciplines such as disaster recovery, archiving, file sync and share, and even primary storage.

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Backup Convergence and Copy Data Management Remedy the Data Protection Pain Point

Today, data protection remains a pain point for many organizations. A big part of that can be attributed to the fact that organizations are creating more and more data. And, many businesses have very little tolerance for down-time—so fast restores are more important than ever.

However, backup software vendors are taking steps to address these challenges. For example, a number of products available today can cap-ture backup and archive data in a single pass. These products also offer indexing function-ality that backup software traditionally has lacked, allowing users to manage archive and backup together.

Other products can catalog and manage array-based snapshots. Using snapshots for fast restores is not new, but historically it has been a separate process requiring additional management. These days, that is no longer the case—snapshots have been integrated into the

data protection process.Disaster recovery and backup are increasingly

converging as well. For years, they were sepa-rate but related processes. Today, many backup software platforms offer replication—that along with virtualization and the cloud have brought DR into reach for many organizations that previously could not afford it.

Finally, copy data management is an emerg-ing approach that seeks to reduce the number of redundant copies of data by storing a single ‘golden copy’ which can be used for backup, archive, test/dev, DR, etc.

This Drill Down takes a look at how data protection is changing today. You’ll learn how and why backup is converging with other IT technologies and how copy data management differs from traditional backup. n

Andrew BurtonExecutive Editor, SearchDataBackup

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Backup in 2015: Convergence With DR, Archive, File Sync/Share

Data protection remains a pain point for many organizations. In a late 2014 survey that research firm Vanson Bourne con-ducted for Veeam Software, 82% of respon-dents said they could not provide the level of availability that end users require.

This is really no surprise, as organiza-tions have been struggling with protecting and restoring data for years, and people (and machines) are creating more data than ever today.

However, we have been watching a few areas where backup is converging with other tech-nologies aimed at streamlining processes, reducing the amount of redundant copies and increasing employee productivity.

BACKUP + ARCHIVE

A recent ESG survey shows IT groups are increasingly taking a converged approach to

backup and archiving. Eighty-three percent of respondents said that they were using their backup software for all or part of an archiving strategy. And, 41% use only their backup soft-ware to create archives.

Historically, backup software was designed to do one thing—restore data following a fail-ure. This isn’t great for archiving because the data is not easily searchable, which is a key feature of an archive. But, keeping backups and archives separate makes for a lot of redun-dant data. So, many backup vendors are add-ing archiving features to their backup software products in an attempt to address this issue. While these products may not offer the full functionality of a dedicated archiving soft-ware platform, their capabilities will likely meet the needs of many organizations.

Some call the concept of reducing redundant copies across backup and archive copy data management. The term was coined by data

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protection vendor Actifio to describe its soft-ware, but it is catching on generically as well.

BACKUP + DISASTER RECOVERY

Another area of convergence we’ve been watch-ing is between backup and disaster recovery. The combination of snapshot, replication and virtualization has made failover feasible for many organizations by reducing costs.

In this process, a replica virtual machine is created at a secondary location. This could be another location operated by the organization or in the cloud. Changes to data are periodi-cally copied to the replica VM throughout the day at intervals set by the organization. If an outage or problem occurs with the primary VM, operations are failed over to the secondary VM so the application or applications running on the VM remain available. This is known as instant recovery or recovery-in-place. Once the primary VM is restored, operations are failed back.

Many backup software products today allow users to conduct this process. For example, Symantec NetBackup offers a feature called

Instant Recovery for VMware. Other products, such as CommVault Simpana, Veeam Backup & Replication and EMC Avamar offer similar capabilities.

BACKUP + FILE SYNC-AND-SHARE

The chatter about mobile device data protec-tion seems to have shifted a bit this year. To be certain, enterprise file sync-and-share is not backup. However, for many organizations, that just might not matter.

Backing up mobile devices presents a number of challenges. One is that many devices make it difficult for backup apps to extract data. Con-nectivity can also be an issue. Finally, most users have personal as well as corporate data stored on their devices, and the personal files should not be copied to a corporate backup repository.

Selective file sync-and-share can be set up so users have access to corporate data they need from any device at any time. If they alter a document using their mobile device, laptop or any other remote computer, the changes are synchronized with the original copy. Many file

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sync-and-share products even allow users to revert back to previous versions of files in the event of corruption, user error or accidental deletion.

These products are, at their core, about user productivity, but because corporate data remains centralized where it can be backed up using traditional methods, many organizations may find them to be a good alternative to mobile device backup.

BACKUP + PRIMARY STORAGE

EMC added ProtectPoint to the latest version of its VMAX enterprise primary storage array in July, allowing customers to back up data from VMAX directly to Data Domain without using backup software. Hewlett-Packard did something similar in December with StoreOnce

Recovery Manager Central for VMware, which backs up directly from 3PAR StoreServ arrays to StoreOnce backup libraries through VMware vCenter. This trend can expand—ven-dors such as Dell and IBM have the pieces to do something similar. But even if no other vendors pick it up, we’ll see more of it. EMC intends to add ProtectPoint support for its other storage arrays and eventually non-EMC arrays.

So, there’s some cool stuff going on in the backup world, but it’s probably a ways off for most shops given the snail’s pace that changes happen when it comes to storage and backup.

In 2015, it would be great to hear from some users that say these technologies are saving time and money and increasing productivity. I’m not going to hold my breath, though—I’m pretty sure backup is still going to be a com-plete pain in 2015. —Andrew Burton

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ENTERPRISE BACKUP DEAD

Modern Backup Still Evolving

Declaring a certain technology such as enterprise backup as dead is a time-honored tactic employed by various manufacturers from time to time to draw attention to their offerings.

Over the years, disk storage suppliers have declared that tape was dead, for example. Despite these pronouncements, tape sales con-tinue to chug along.

Likewise, there have been some who have stated that mechanical disk is on its way out of the data center with the advent of flash storage technology. But this, too, seems highly unlikely given the fact that disk manufacturers are pouring research and development dollars into developing ever higher-density disk drives, while enhancing the power efficiency of their products.

NEW DATA PROTECTION PARADIGM?

Some of the vendors in the server virtualiza-tion backup space have declared that traditional enterprise backup is now dead. They claim that protecting virtual machines (VMs) requires a whole new paradigm for protecting data. While these claims have merit, they assume that data center environments today are mostly virtualized.

But, according to various surveys, only half of server resources in today’s data centers have been virtualized. This means that anywhere from 40-50% of applications still run on phys-ical servers.

So while data center environments need backup products that are virtualization “friendly,” they also still need backup technolo-

Declaring a certain technology is dead is a time-honored tactic employed by manufacturers from time to time to draw attention to their offerings.

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gies that can manage mixed application work-loads—both physical and virtual.

TAPE IS STILL RELEVANT

Another area that virtualization-centric backup technologies are not particularly well suited for is tape backup.

One virtualization backup product, Veeam, is starting to encroach into the enterprise backup world by incorporating features like support for exporting data to tape. This may be fine for those environments with modest tape-out requirements, but it may not be adequate for larger enterprises that need a backup offering that is optimized to write large volumes of data to tape.

Certain records, like financial and healthcare data, are bound by regulatory requirements that mandate the long-term retention of this infor-mation. And now with open tape technologies like LTFS on the market, tape is becoming an

increasingly popular option for long-term data archival. Traditional backup products are opti-mized to write and read data from tape devices. Consequently, many organizations are going to need traditional enterprise backup technology to manage these data assets.

TRADITIONAL AND VIRTUAL

BACKUP CONVERGENCE

Many of the traditional backup software ven-dors have added virtualization modules into their products to enable data center environ-ments to manage data protection for mixed physical and virtual workloads. In fact, some of the traditional backup offerings now provide many of the same backup capabilities that were formerly only available from virtual-specific backup applications.

For example, some legacy backup applica-tions provide the option to back up at the VM guest level and/or they tie directly into the data

Certain records, like financial and healthcare data, are bound by regulato-ry requirements that mandate the long-term retention of this infor mation.

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protection APIs embedded within the hypervi-sor. This can provide many of the same backup efficiencies and operational benefits that are touted by the virtualization backup vendors.

BACKUP MODULARIZATION

Some backup suppliers have modularized their backup technologies to allow end users to take a best-of-breed approach while still managing all their virtual and physical backup workloads from a single backup management platform. As an example, EMC now allows some of their data protection technologies to be mixed and matched to suit the individual needs of the customer. For instance, Avamar’s NDMP accel-eration technology can be used as a separate module within NetWorker backup environ-ments to support the near-instantaneous back-ups of NAS systems.

There also has been some integration between NetWorker and Avamar to provide a greater breadth of feature functionality across both offerings. For example, NetWorker users can now take advantage of Avamar’s VM image-level backup capabilities, by upgrading

to a more current release of NetWorker. Like-wise, Avamar users can now export data to tape thanks to the porting of NetWorker’s tape management code into Avamar.

It’s this type of hybrid approach of blending classic enterprise backup and virtualization backup capabilities that many organizations need to meet their mixed-workload require-ments. To be sure, it is likely that vendors like EMC and Dell, who have traditional backup technologies and virtualization-specific backup products in their portfolio, will eventually merge these capabilities into a single offering at some point in time. But until that time comes, there will still be a big demand for tra-ditional enterprise backup technology.

IS THE CLOUD A TRADITIONAL BACKUP KILLER?

Among the most popular use cases for pub-lic cloud storage services are backup and DR. Some organizations are electing to push backup data into the cloud instead of invest-ing in the infrastructure required to manage backup information on-premises. And with cloud NAS offerings, like those available from

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Avere Systems, organizations can fully auto-mate the movement of backup data between private cloud storage resources and low-cost cloud storage capacity available from providers like Amazon, giving them a true tiered-storage approach for managing data.

Certainly the cloud will be a factor long-term in the evolution of enterprise backup. But today, many businesses still need the ability to store certain data sets on-premises to comply both with corporate governance data policies (like keeping highly sensitive IP on-site at all times) and regulatory mandates which have stringent requirements around the data chain of custody. Moreover, having a local backup copy allows organizations to perform data restores in a more timely fashion, as the data would not have to traverse a WAN.

ENTERPRISE BACKUP ISN’T DEAD,

IT’S JUST EVOLVING

While many of the virtualization backup ven-dors have seen their sales soar over the last several years, the traditional backup vendors continue to retain strong market-share posi-tions. This is clear evidence that the demand for traditional backup technology remains strong in the enterprise.

It is likely that there will be more conver-gence between traditional backup products, virtualization-specific backup technologies and cloud backup offerings going forward. This should present the best outcome for end users, as it could provide the fullest range of options for meeting the varied data protection requirements across the enterprise.

—Colm Keegan

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BACKUP STRATEGY

Backup and DR Draw Closer

Data protection has evolved at such a rapid pace over the last few years that today’s backup and disaster recovery systems barely resemble those from a decade ago. One of the ways this evolution has occurred is through the convergence of backup and disaster recovery.

On the surface, backup and disaster recov-ery might seem like the same thing, but there is a difference. Backups have historically involved making redundant copies of data. In contrast, disaster recovery is all about how backups and other fault-tolerant mechanisms are put to work after a disaster occurs.

To understand and appreciate how these two concepts have merged within a single data backup strategy, it is necessary to consider the way that backups were performed in the past. For decades, backups involved using a sched-uled process to copy data to removable media (such as tape). Removable media backups are

still used today, but they have largely given way to continuous backups that copy data to a disk-based storage array on an ongoing basis. This type of backup is referred to as continuous data protection.

HOW CDP, TAPE-BASED

BACKUP STRATEGIES DIFFER

Continuous data protection systems are differ-ent from legacy tape-based backups in many different ways. One such difference is that tape-based backups result in the accumulation of a large collection of backup media. Depend-ing on how the backup is made, the same data might get backed up over and over again.

Conversely, modern backup software that relies on continuous data protection may only retain a single copy of the data, which is updated as changes are made. These systems allow users to roll back data to a point in time

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before corruption or hardware failure occurred.Of course, it is important to keep the backup

server and the backup target (the storage array) from becoming a single point of failure. That being the case, many continuous data protec-tion systems are also designed to replicate their contents to a secondary storage device. This might be another storage array, cloud storage or even a tape library.

One of the things that made continuous data protection so popular as a data backup strat-egy is the fact that it effectively dealt with the problems of data growth and shrinking backup windows. Continuous data protection sys-tems completely eliminate the backup window. There is simply no need to schedule a backup, because backups occur periodically throughout the day.

Prior to continuous data protection sys-tems, backup administrators often struggled to complete backups within the allotted backup window, but that wasn’t the only time-related

challenge. The recovery process after a disas-ter typically involved a long restoration pro-cess. This process was sometimes so long that administrators had to prioritize their data so that the most critical data could be restored first.

SNAPSHOT, REPLICATION

AND VIRTUALIZATION

The convergence of backup and disaster recov-ery technologies has occurred largely because snapshot, replication and virtualization have made it possible to recover from a disaster without the need for a traditional data restora-tion. The methods involved in this convergence seek to minimize storage cost, while also allow-ing for instant recovery.

Every vendor takes a slightly different approach to achieving these goals, and the terminology used can also vary from one ven-dor to the next. Generally speaking, instant

The basic philosophy behind instant recovery is that a full-blown restoration is unnecessary if there is already a copy of the data available.

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recovery and minimized storage costs are achieved through the use of differencing disks and snapshots.

A differencing disk is a virtual hard disk that has been reserved for a special purpose. A snapshot is a process that redirects write oper-ations to a differencing disk. With these two concepts in mind, consider how instant recov-ery becomes possible.

The basic philosophy behind instant recovery is that a full-blown restoration is unnecessary if there is already a copy of the data available online. Rather than launching a traditional restore operation, the failed system can simply make use of the data that is already available on the backup storage array.

Of course, the problem with this approach as part of an effective backup strategy is that if you were to simply redirect a server in a way that allowed it to use your backup in place of its primary storage, the contents of the backup would soon be modified. This is where differ-encing disks and snapshots come into play.

Before the failed server is allowed to use the data residing on the backup array, a snapshot is created. The snapshot results in the creation

of a differencing disk. The failed server can use the data from the backup array, but only for read operations. All write operations are directed to the differencing disk. This ensures that the backup remains in a pristine state.

In the meantime, the failed server’s storage can be rebuilt and data can be replicated from the backup array to the failed server’s newly rebuilt storage. Once the replication has been completed, the contents of the differencing disk are merged onto the server’s storage and then operations are redirected from the backup storage array to the server’s usual storage device.

The same concept that allows for instant recovery can also be used to create test/dev environments without actually having to cre-ate additional copies of the data. Snapshots are used to create differencing disks that are used solely in the lab environment. Some vendors refer to this as virtual lab technology. The nice thing about it is that it allows lab environments to be instantly created, without incurring the storage costs that would normally be required to store a full copy of the production data.

—Brien M. Posey

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

ANDREW BURTON is executive editor with the Storage Media Group.

COLM KEEGAN is an analyst with Storage Switzerland.

BRIEN M. POSEY is an independent backup expert and frequent contributor to SearchDataBackup.

Modern Data Protection Is More Than Backup is a SearchDataBackup.com e-publication.

Rich Castagna | VP of Editorial/Storage Media Group

Ellen O’Brien | Associate Editorial Director

Andrew Burton | Executive Editor

Ed Hannan | Senior Managing Editor

Dave Raffo | Senior News Director

Linda Koury | Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer

Jillian Coffin | Publisher jcoffin@techtarget.com

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