Pros, cons of centralised data backup

The need to be close to customers, manufacturing facilities and specialised labour has required organisations to extend the traditional concept of "headquarters" to offices and factories hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.

However, along with the opportunities that come with workforce globalisation, come the realities of dealing with data that sprawls across the organisation. Whether the data is at the Cape Town branch or at head office in Johannesburg, it is equally susceptible to loss, requiring that data recovery and security plans apply to all parts of the organisation, regardless of location.

To protect company data and ensure it's availability to users, IT organisations have been conflicted between two backup approaches. The first approach, local tape backup, requires that tape libraries be present wherever there are servers in racks. Local area network (LAN) access to the servers gives administrators fast data backup and recovery. The newer approach, centralised backup, puts high-density tape libraries in one location to which data from servers around the world is backed up.

While centralised backup requires less hardware, reduces administration time, and solves the security problem associated with loose tape media, it can introduce greater bandwidth consumption and longer backup/restore windows. Because of these issues, centralised backup has been a leap some managers have not been willing to make.

Centralised backup has been a leap some managers have not been willing to make.

Nathan Ragovan, divisional head for storage, Zycko SA

WDS (wide area data services) is a superset of several network acceleration categories, including data reduction and compression as well as protocol and application optimisation. WDS can eliminate the bandwidth and time constraints that stall many centralised backup deployments and are the primary enabler of many technology consolidation projects.

WDS technologies can accelerate centralised backup and recovery processes, reduce bandwidth usage, and enable data and IT consolidation. These technologies free business from the constraints of latency and bandwidth, allowing the company to save millions of rand by utilising centralised technology solutions with unlimited scalability.

Leveraging the capabilities of WDS, storage specialists are replacing local tape libraries with more scalable and secure network-based systems. Security analysts are no longer drafting extensive procedural documents to manage a growing swarm of loose tape media. CIOs are revising disaster recovery SLAs to reflect new levels of reliability, and CFOs are planning budgets on more practical technology growth. WDS will not only enable IT organisations to efficiently manage the increasingly critical technology infrastructure of today's business, but will also facilitate compliance with new government regulations mandating the security of sensitive company data.

Whether protecting remote data onto centralised tape or disk backup systems, WDS solutions enable organisations to move data between sites without the constraints of distance and throughput. The WDS solutions available today accelerate applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times faster than conventional transport mechanisms with up to a 95% reduction in WAN bandwidth utilisation.

This technology delivers immediate benefits to remote data protection processes, transporting backup payloads that don't congest existing circuits and providing remote data recovery at rates fast enough to match local tape metrics.

WDS solutions consist of four tiers, each streamlining the inherent inefficiencies of applications across the WAN:

* Data streamlining ensures the same data never crosses the WAN twice;
* Transport streamlining eliminates dead time on high-latency circuits;
* Application streamlining accelerates popular business applications for remote users to speeds available at the central office; and
* Management streamlining facilitates deployment and administration of WDS technology.

A key value of WDS solutions is that it is designed to accelerate all traffic that runs over TCP and UDP. While this brief is designed to focus on the backup and recovery process, it is important to note that this same technology can be used to accelerate file sharing, e-mail, document management, and all other applications that are important to the organisation.

Consider the scenarios where WDS solutions can improve data protection operations:

1. A desktop drive at a remote sales office fails and its user files need to be restored to a rebuilt PC. Restoring 2GB of documents from the central office used to take four hours where now it takes just under five minutes.
2. Backing up the remote office's file server used to take eight hours with a 25% chance of completing successfully. Now backups take 25 minutes and succeed 100% of the time.
3. Running a backup or restore always meant access to headquarters was slow. Now, data protection processes can be run during business hours with little to no impact to branch users.
4. Pushing out an operating system patch to a remote office required either a remote file server as a distribution point or an all-night push from the central office. Now a 10MB patch can be installed onto 40 remote machines in under two minutes.

* Nathan Ragovan is divisional head for storage at Zycko South Africa. His responsibilities include driving the storage strategy for Zycko SA and oversees, as well as all sales, marketing and technical facets of the division.