Storage Cat 08 6/10/08 09:07 Page 50
50 ADVERTORIAL
MAKING SENSE OF
IT Challenges: It’s ugly out there
Words: By i365, A Seagate Company
In order to understand the cost advantages of online backup, to solve this problem, it is only adequate for short periods of
it is first important to understand the challenges that time. Ultimately, data must be moved off-site.
businesses face in protecting their business-critical data. Inability to verify backup data – Most people do not turn on the
The reliance on data and application availability has created option to “verify after write” on their tape drives because this
internal and external challenges for business owners and their adds 30-50 percent to the time required to complete the backup.
IT staff. As data volumes grow rapidly, IT personnel are asked No quick 24x7 access to data for recovery – If tapes are
to manage more projects. They struggle to support more removed from the drives to be sent off-site, there is a
computers and people across distributed environments significant delay in those tapes returning for recovery purposes.
because of the disproportionate amount of time spent on
managing backup tasks. These issues can be made worse by Now is the time for online backup
company expansion or acquisition when additional time and Mature technology and falling disk prices are driving adoption.
resources are needed to create, integrate and standardise Market conditions and IT administrators’ ever-growing
new processes. weariness of tape backup have caused businesses to seriously
External forces are also adding to the backup-related consider the security, reliability, availability and scalability
challenges that organisations are facing today. Heightened advantages of online backup. Technology maturation and other
awareness around business continuity and regulatory market conditions have also contributed to the traction online
compliance has caused businesses to increase spending on backup and recovery has made over the past few years.
their data protection activities. In fact, companies spent an Adoption of disk-based storage rose by 114 percent from
estimated $5.5 billion to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley alone in 1999 to 2002.
2
Other market factors contributing to this
2004.
1
While compliance and headline-grabbing disasters are adoption include:
often credited for increased focus on business continuity, the • Continued price reductions in reliable and high-bandwidth
truth remains that IT staffs must solve difficult, everyday network connections
issues if they are going to maintain optimum data availability. • Large and easily scalable RAID storage systems lowering in
Traditional tape backup or even local disk-to-disk data price, increasing in reliability
protection is no match for these daunting challenges, i.e. • Acceptance of encryption security methods
shrinking backup windows, rapid data growth, lack of central • Regulations mandating off-site storage have superseded
control over distributed systems, increasing rate of central concerns about moving data to third-party data centres
control over distributed systems and increasing rate of
recovery failure Automation provides added security layer
From a security perspective, online backup uses industry-
The problem with tape standard encryption algorithms that have made data
For more than 50 years, businesses have utilised tape-based transport over private or public networks no longer a concern
backup schemes. While proponents tout low media costs and for many distributed businesses. In fact, security is enhanced
portability, tape backup increases the amount of time and compared to manually managing removable tape media and
effort needed to administer backup and recovery tasks. engaging untrained staff in remote locations.
Slower backup and recovery speeds – Tape’s linear recording Online backup centralises resources, which improves the
format takes more time to write and restore backup data security and reliability of backup tasks. For larger
when compared to the random-access capability of disk. Tape organisations, IT staff are centralised at their data centres,
restore times are further slowed by having to locate and while tape backup devices and unqualified personnel tasked
mount the media to find the needed information. with managing them are located in remote offices. Online
Manual intervention is required to get data off-site – backup enables remote installation and management of agents
without manual intervention, backup tapes remain in the tape that initiate the backup process and push backed up data to a
drive, leaving the data vulnerable to physical events. While central repository.
disk-to-disk backup (external drives, appliances) is attempting Increased reliability drives better processes, lowers cost
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