Data Protection
When is Tape Not Enough?
Data Recovery
What if …
� Information is a key
business asset
� System downtime is very
expensive
� Disaster recovery is more
than just backups
Fire, flood, earthquake—a modern information based business cannot afford
to lose its data, nor access to its data.
There are standard techniques to deal with normal hardware failures and
minor data corruptions and losses. Nevertheless, there is always the
possibility of some form of catastrophic failure which such routine precautions
cannot address, and which could produce major data loss at worst, or at best
system downtime.
The traditional approach to data recovery has been to keep offsite tape
backups. These can be used to restore to a known point then later
transactions can be reapplied. SANs can help to reduce the downtime for the
backup window to near zero, but the restore time can be many hours or even
days. Use of RAID and/or storage virtualization has a big (negative) impact on
data recovery and rebuild times.