Backup, archive, de-duplication: what are you talking about? All I want to do is make sure I can get my information back if I have an issue with my systems.
This is a question with which many of the small and medium enterprises, and believe it or not, the largest companies, are asking for assistance.
But with budgets shrinking and available time becoming as scarce as our personal funds, and the majority of South African IT experts already shuffling furniture in their newly acquired Sydney apartments, most advice will relate to the latest and most popular technologies available.
This is not a direct attempt to fool the poor IT manager. Some of these products and technologies offer huge savings in the correct environment and when deployed for the correct reasons. It is just a reality that budgets are short everywhere and as such, marketing, training and sales incentives will be directed towards the products that have the highest perceived return to the respective organisation.
What often ends up happening is we either skip the problem altogether (some surveys show as high as 70% of SMEs have no backup strategy), or we go for the solution that costs the least - whether we have determined if it is the correct one or not.
I would like to offer a few pointers to help with where to direct these discussions.
Backup or archive? Why do I need both? Aren't they both copies of my data?
What often ends up happening is we either skip the problem altogether, or we go for the solution that costs the least.
Adam Day is product manager at SYSDBA.
This is a common misconception; the truth is while there are sometimes similarities, the end uses vary dramatically. A backup is used to reduce risk of data loss in the short-term and covers events such as a virus or physical disk failure. This tends to be something done on a daily or weekly basis and is consistently over-written to reduce the amount of physical space required to effectively store the data.
An archive is used for a much longer-term requirement and is more often associated with legal requirements. If I use e-mail as an example: if an organisation I work for was being investigated relating to financial irregularities in a specific deal, it would be much more important to be able to produce the financial director's communications regarding the event than my own.
With this in mind, archiving may not be required for all employees, whereas a backup would most likely be a necessity to maintain decent levels of productivity for staff - you don't want to keep paying employees to do the same task twice.
While there can be an integration in some of the enterprise solutions available, when it comes to investigating the backup versus archive question, consider what the information is needed for, and then consider which technology to use.
Disk or tape? Isn't tape dead anyway?
I have often heard this statement in the last few years. With the advent of low-cost disk and the proliferation of technologies like CD and DVD, people are unsure which media should be used to store backups.
The first point often raised is: disk is so much faster than tape, why even have tape around anymore? While this might be true of certain situations, it is most definitely not the case for all. Tape will by far be able to outperform disk in an environment with large files or volume restores, and also outperform disk in terms of cost per megabyte and transportability (as in offsite storage).
In terms of disk as a backup media, it offers huge performance advantages when performing single file restores, or reducing common issues such as media failures. With the advent of technologies such as de-duplication, it can drastically reduce the amount of capacity required, as well as the backup windows required to do the data protection.
I would, however, recommend that with many low-cost offerings for both technologies, a fusion of both is within the reach of most organisations today and would be the best of both worlds.
As to the use of DVD and CD as a data protection solution, I would rather advise a low-cost tape device, or one of the dedicated low-cost disk solutions that are available today, as they are purpose-built for data protection and lowering risks. Copying a company's data or lifeblood to CD and then sticking on a label is too much risk.
Consider that 80% of organisations that have lost access to their data for more than four or five days have gone out of business within two years. So be careful when choosing how to protect company data.
* Adam Day is product manager at SYSDBA.
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