Compliance, Data Protection, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery

Compliance, Data Protection, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery

Compliance, data protection, business continuity, and disaster recovery have become priorities for IT organizations in the last decade, in particular due to acts of war, natural disasters, scandalous employee behavior (financial, security, and otherwise), and regulations from government or industry bodies. IT organizations of today have additional pressure on them to ensure that every byte of data is protected, secured, and replicated to a distant facility in real time (synchronous) or near real time (asynchronous) to ensure that transactions relative to key business applications, communications, or even basic productivity applications are recoverable:

• Synchronous replication: Used for business-critical tier-1 applications, data, and infrastructure. Provides the ability to guarantee data coherency to the last successfully completed transaction. Generally bound to small geographic areas due to transmission latency and bandwidth requirements, typically a metropolitan area. Used primarily for hot sites, where recovery times need to be minimal.

• Asynchronous replication: Used for less-critical applications or for longer-distance replication where transmission latency and bandwidth prohibit synchronous operation. Enables replication of data across a larger geography but might compromise coherency, as the replica site might not have received the latest transactions. Used primarily for warm or cold sites, where recovery times can take longer.

Meeting coherency challenges is next to impossible. With a distributed server infrastructure, the distance separating the IT personnel chartered with the responsibility of data management is commonly combined with reduced technical expertise and differences of opinion surrounding priority of such tasks. For example, IT resources chartered with data protection tasks in remote branch offices might treat data protection management as a repetitive annoyance. (Swapping tapes and rerunning failed backup jobs might not be the most enjoyable of responsibilities.) IT resources chartered with data protection tasks in the data center see data protection as a business-critical job function and generally take great strides to ensure its success.

Server consolidation enables the cost-savings metrics discussed in the previous section and also allows IT organizations to better meet data protection requirements and regulation from industry or government bodies more effectively. Not only is it good practice to keep copies of data to use for recovery purposes, many industries and agencies are mandated to do so and must adhere to strict guidelines. Having fewer silos of data in fewer locations means fewer pieces of data need to be protected, which translates into better compliance with such regulation.

A side benefit of server consolidation is that fewer redundant copies of data need to be kept, and global collaboration across multiple locations can be safely enabled, thereby mitigating version control and data discrepancies in most cases. For example, assume that a company has 100 branch offices, each with two servers and 250 GB of total storage capacity per remote location. If the storage capacity at each location is 50 percent utilized, each location has approximately 125 GB of data that needs to be protected. If each site has even 20 GB of data that is common among each of the locations (an extremely conservative estimation), 2 TB of data storage capacity is wasted across the enterprise—not only on disk, but also on tape media housing the backup copies. Alongside having wasted capacity due to redundancy, approximately 12.5 TB of disk capacity is unutilized. Other, less commonly measured resources will also benefit from server consolidation, such as processor utilization, memory consumption, and network interface utilization. Figure 1-4 illustrates storage utilization in a distributed infrastructure.

Figure 1-4. Low Utilization and Stranded Capacity

[View full size image]

By collapsing this infrastructure into the data center, redundant copies of data can be safely eliminated. Higher levels of efficiency can be gained, because data can be stored on shared arrays, which in turn enables capacity planning efforts and capital purchases to be amortized. The need to overprovision a remote branch office server with excess capacity that goes largely unutilized is nearly eliminated. Expert-level, experienced, and well-trained data center IT staff using enterprise-class data protection software and hardware can manage the protection of the data, ensuring that backup windows are better managed, fewer operations fail, and failed operations are corrected.

Figure 1-5 illustrates an efficiently designed network, using accelerators for storage consolidation and data protection. Within the illustration, an automated backup process has been centralized to the data center, eliminating the need for "human" intervention.

Figure 1-5. High Utilization, High Efficiency, and Lower Costs

[View full size image]

With fewer silos of data, a smaller number of data protection components need to be purchased and maintained, including tape drives, tape libraries, and expensive tape media, which again lowers costs.