Because of that, data protection gets attention (and major funding) when there is a significant problem. There is an increasing problem in getting the protection done in the allotted time, meeting the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). With capacity demand growing, the current methods of protecting data are being examined to improve the approaches.

At the Dell Storage Forum in Boston last week, there was more talk that IT has made a transition to include the use of snapshot and replication in the data protection process. Snapshots, or point-in-time copies that are synchronized with applications for a coherent snapshot copy, have become the primary means for making a copy that can meet the RTO for many of the primary cases where restores are required. About 90% of restores occur within 30 days of when that data was created or updated. The snapshots are typically done using features in the storage system, but may also use special host software.

Replication is typically a remote copy that is used for disaster protection and leveraged also for restores of data that may have been damaged (corrupted or deleted) locally. The mechanics of the recovery varies significantly between the different vendor solutions.

Backup is still used and still a valuable tool in the data protection arsenal. It is now just a part of the overall picture which includes snapshots and replication. Extensions to backup software are capitalizing on these transitions by IT and include such capabilities as invoking the storage system-based snapshots, managing the catalog of snapshot copies, and managing the remote copies of data.

Exploitation of storage system or hypervisor-based features such as Changed Block Tracking are another means to improve the data protection by reducing the amount of time required and the amount data. This is another developing area and will be a differentiator between different backup software solutions and the storage system hardware that has those capabilities.

Backup software will effectively need to be renamed to something that reflects that what it does goes beyond traditional backup.

The transitions occurring in data protection are being driven by IT to meet requirements to protect data while also meeting operational considerations. Software and hardware solutions can enable the transitions and make the operations more seamless. This will continue to be a developing area – both for vendor products and the adoption by IT.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

As always, the first step was to interview the key people in the company. The purpose of these interview is to find out about the current situation and to understand what the staff believes about the DR plan. With a company of this size, it did not take long to understand the situation. The staffers generally believed they could handle a disaster and had no immediate concerns. However, the current situation did not give me the same confidence.

There were two servers used for the major applications, an accounting system and a CRM system. These servers were also used for general file sharing. Each of the two applications had customized reports added. The individual laptops and desktops each had their own office software installed as well as many unshared files and copies of the shared files.

A tape backup was run every night for the servers, and one of the staff took the tape home and rotated through a week’s worth of backups. The tapes were never checked. The service provider who would restore tapes was a part-time administrator who ran a business providing services for other organizations.

The administrator, known inside this company as “the guy,” would come over on demand when there was an issue. The DR plan was to take the tapes to the part-time administrator’s office and restore the data on servers there. This had never been done, not even as a test.

The company’s DR plan did not address the possibility of a regional disaster where the personnel were not available or operations were impacted by lack of power or a network failure. The feeling was that the operations could tolerate being unavailable for a week, and any longer impact was highly unlikely and had greater consequences that would overshadow being out of operation. The possibility of losing key personnel was not included in this review but was part of an overall staffing plan.

The shortcomings were obvious, but the real issue was the lack of understanding of their limitations and the practices required. There was an unwarranted belief that there would be no issue restoring data from tape and that any server could immediately assume the role of the application servers and did not need to be exercised regularly. This obviously meant that the company needed education around the topic of DR and best practices, and that the local service provider chosen may not have the skill or desire to do what was really best for the customer.

I wrote a report and made recommendations of what should be done. The flexibility to address the problems was more limited with the small business than with companies that I would typically deal with, so I needed to consider the expenses and training.

Small businesses need a disaster recovery plan and a set of practices to implement. They also need education about how to develop a plan, what to look for and some criteria around choosing a services provider (“the guy”). It will be interesting to follow-up and see what changes are made.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Backup Exec 2012, designed for SMBs and Windows-based backups, will support the V-Ray features already integrated into Symantec’s NetBackup enterprise application. Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition betas have gone out to 45,0000 Symantec registered global partners.

Symantec has generated a lot of noise around its V-Ray technology, which makes all of its products better optimized for virtual machines. For Backup Exec 2012, V-Ray lets Symantec customers do a physical-to-virtual conversion. This lets an administrator take a backup copy and convert it from a physical machine to a virtual machine for disaster recovery. Organizations will be able to recover a failed system to a physical server or to a Hyper-V or VM guest.

“The backup to the VM can be done in parallel, in sequence or serially,” said Aidian Finley, senior manager for product marketing for Symantec’s Information Management Group. :”The administrator has the choice of when to do that conversion. We call it ‘no hardware physical recovery.’”

The Backup Exec administration console has a new interface so administrators can automatically configure common policies and settings for quicker configuration and data protection.

Backup Exec can be purchased as an appliance, a software application or as a cloud service.

The rollout is the largest partner-only beta program Symantec has ever put into place. The idea of providing the beta product to partners is to give them a chance to shape the application, said Arya Barirani, senior director of product marketing for Symantec’s Information Management Group.

“It’s really a way [for partners and customers] to get their hands on this product and test it,” Barirani said.

As the term implies, these applications are the most critical to an organization. In most cases, downtime or interruption to business critical applications causes a significant negative impact to the company. This negative impact can be financial or an embarrassment that could lead to loss of future business.

When companies quantify the business impact of the loss of critical apps, they usually measure it in financial terms such as a material loss of ‘x’ dollars per hour of unavailability. They also look at longer term impacts, such as the number of customers that will go to a competitor because of the downtime. Not only will that business be lost, but the likelihood of the next transaction going somewhere else impacts future business.

A more jarring measurement that some IT professionals use to explain the justification for a business continuance/disaster recovery strategy is how long of an outage would be impossible to recover from, forcing the company out of business. These numbers vary widely by industry, but they certainly get a lot of attention when measured in days or hours.

Storage is a key element in meeting business critical application availability needs, although the amount of management they require on the storage end varies by application. Requirements for storage systems used for business critical applications start with four key areas:

• Data Protection – The potential data loss due to operational error (from a variety of causes), corruption from the application, or a hardware malfunction is real. A recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) need to be established for business critical applications. This will dictate the frequency of protection with the generations retained, the data protection technology needed to meet the time and capacity requirements, and the recovery procedures. The data protection strategy used for a business critical application may be different than secondary -– or Tier 2 — applications.
• Business Continuance / Disaster Recovery – BC/DR is a storage-led implementation where the replication of data on the storage systems is the most fundamental element. A solid BC/DR plan requires storage systems that can provide coherent replication of data to one or more geographically dispersed locations. This capability is necessary to ensure the operational availability of the critical app.
• Security – Secure environments and secure access to information are implied with business critical applications. From a storage standpoint, the control of access to information is an absolute requirement and is not always addressed adequately when developing a storage strategy. Block storage systems protect access through masking and physical connection limitations, moving the security problem to the servers. File storage for unstructured data uses a permissions set that relies on the diligence of administrators and has potential openings that must be addressed with careful consideration. This area will improve as more investments are made in storage for unstructured data.
• Performance – Most of the time, business critical applications demand high performance. For storage, quality of service and service level agreements are defined to meet minimum requirements for operation that do not degrade or impede the application’s execution. These require measurement and monitoring of the storage to determine impacting events and degradations where actions can be taken. Isolating performance issues is a complex task that requires skilled storage administrators with tools that work with the storage systems and networks.

Organizations must give careful consideration to their storage for business critical apps. There needs to be a process for understanding the requirements, evaluating the choices for systems that can meet the requirements, and a strategy for the overall business of storing and protecting information.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Storage professionals interact with business owners in a variety of ways. These include:

• The storage team partners with the business owners in planning storage and data protection.
• The storage group is perceived as a resource to be called upon by the business owners. The group provides storage at a particular rate (ie “gold level”) which dictates performance, data protection and cost.
• The business owners are less than cooperative with the storage team, making demands while providing little planning or guidelines regarding their needs. And the business owners complain that storage provisioning is always holding them back.

There are variations of these, and some extreme cases that make for interesting discussions, but storage professionals always raise one common point. That is, when it comes to business continuance/disaster recovery (BC/DR), the storage group plays a key role in putting together an effective solution. Planning, implementing, and periodically testing BC and DR for a business or organization are complicated, costly and necessary processes for most organizations. This is where the storage team is a critical resource, and its influence reaches into the deployment of storage for critical applications.

Planning BC and DR requires an expertise gained from experience. Storage people generally understand this, and can leverage these processes for making more effective and long-term storage decisions.

Understanding all the options and technologies involved in BC and DR is an important skill for storage professionals. They need to be continually learning about technologies and products to be effective. This information will help them make decisions at critical moments about deploying applications that can add to the success of a company.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Arkeia began delivering its backup software on appliances four years ago, and this week launched its third generation of appliances. They include the data deduplication that Arkeia added to its software a year ago, solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate updates to the backup catalog, and up to 20 TB of internal disk on the largest model.

“Since 2007, we’ve been telling everybody that appliances would be big,” Evans said. “Symantec has validated the market for us.”

Evans said about 25% of Arkeia’s customers buy appliances. Because they take less time to set up and manage, he said appliances are popular in remote offices and among organizations without much IT staff.

The new appliances are the R120 (1 TB usable), the R220 (2 TB, 4 TB or 6 TB), the R320 (8TB or 16 TB) and the R620 (10 TB or 20 TB). The two smaller models include optional LTO-4 tape drives while the two larger units support 8 Gbps Fibre Channel to move data off to external tape libraries and RAID 6. They all include Arkeia Network Backup 9 software and built-in support for VMware vSphere. Arekeia’s progressive dedupe for source and target data is included with the R320 and R620, and optional with the R220. Pricing ranges from $3,500 for the R120 to $47,000 to the R620 with 20 TB.

The R620 includes 256 GB SSDs, enough to manage the backup catalog. “We would never put backup sets on SSDs, that would be too expensive,” Evans said. “But it makes sense to use SSDs to manage our catalog, which is a database of our backups. The catalog is random, and updating the catalog could be a performance bottleneck.”

“If we were simply a cloud gateway and combined SSDs and disk in a single package, we wouldn’t know what incoming data should live on SSD and what should live on disk. It all looks the same. Because we wrote the [backup] application, we could say ‘this data lives on disk and this data lives on SSD.’”

For disaster recovery, the appliances can be used to boot a failed machine by downloading software from a backup server to the failed machine. The appliances can also replicate data to cloud service providers.

Two servers that hold the Parish of Orleans Civil District Court’s conveyance and mortgage records going back to the 1980s crashed simultaneously on Oct. 25, and the court has been without critical digital real estate records since then. The documents stored on the servers’ database exist on paper, but the computerized index linking them to their physical location was on one of the failed servers.

Members of the court’s IT staff are blaming the problem on Seagate’s i365, according to a series of stories on the incident in The Times-Picayune newspaper. The court is under contract with i365 to use its EVault Remote Disaster Recovery Service, EVault SaaS and SaaS plus, and Evault Express Recovery Appliance. i365 had been backing up records and purging them every 30 days from August 2009. Last July, i365 sent a software update to the court to install. The court’s IT staff said it installed the update and received a message saying it was installed correctly.

But no data was backed up since July, and other records were purged after their 30-day expiration date. The court did recover digital conveyance records from the 1980s up to March 27, 2009, and mortgage data through Aug. 6, 2009. But that left more than 150,000 documents without digital records or indexes to them.

While i365 has refused to comment publicly, an email from one of its executives to the chairwoman of the court’s technology committee obtained by the Times-Picayune put at least some of the blame with the court:

“The continued exposure of this situation hurts all involved — i365, Orleans Parish and the Civil District Court,” Dave Hallmen, head of i365′s Worldwide Sales and Marketing division, wrote to [judge Piper] Griffin on Nov. 5. “We have instructed our staff to refrain from publicizing our service call records which support our position that Civil District Court IT personnel failed to properly maintain the on-site software and backup jobs.”

According to the Times-Picayune, the court’s IT staff also inadvertently lost or corrupted database information when trying to troubleshoot the failed Dell servers.

Earlier this month, the court contracted with a data management firm, The Windward Group, to restore 35,000 missing conveyance records and 119,000 lost mortgage records by Jan. 2 at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the Times-Picayune. About 30,000 records have been restored.

The snafu is taking its toll on real estate sales in the area. According to the Times-Picayune, title insurance companies are reluctant to underwrite home sales and some refinancing deals without up-to-date records.

Regardless of who’s at fault, i365 competitors will be sure to use the incident to push alterative DR solutions. Larry Lang, CEO of QuorumLabs, said the New Orleans incident highlights problems with backing up to the cloud. QuorumLabs sells onQ backup appliances that can provide DR when used in pairs.

“Sometimes your data goes up into the cloud and when you go to pull it back it’s not there anymore,” Lang said. “It’s like freeze drying stuff, you don’t know what will happen when you add water. When [the court’s IT staff] went back to add water, there was nothing there.”

Lang said the incident also shows the importance of DR testing. onQ appliances allow customers to automatically test their restore capabilities. “You should consistently run tests to make sure your snapshots are good,” he said.