 The advent of cloud computing and service-oriented data protection is mutating the role of backup administrator. The backup process is becoming a service offering by the IT department as part of the internal cloud's application service level agreement.
The backup administrator's role is transforming from the traditional tape jockey into a data protection policy manager. An example of this is the push by many to make network backup more of a policy engine for backup and disaster recovery business continuity.
Three recent advancements in technology are beginning to transform data center operations and the role of the IT Administrator:
- Virtualization (Server and Storage)
- Disk-based continuous and snapshot data protection
- Data Deduplication
Virtualization (Server and Storage): The role of server virtualization is to provide an abstraction layer between the server hardware and applications, so they can be moved between servers at will, and the role of storage virtualization is to provide the same abstraction between the servers and the storage.
The ability to abstract applications and storage from the actual hardware makes the hardware a commodity, enables applications to be moved from one server to another at anytime, without downtime, and allows storage to be purchased based on price and reliability, rather than functionality in the firmware.
Storage virtualization also facilitates the movement of data. Application data can be moved anywhere, anytime, based on performance or other requirements via a policy created by the IT admin.
Disk-based continuous and snapshot data protection: A continuous data protection (CDP) and snapshots to the mix eliminates the need to do bulk transfers of data over the network to make actual backup copies. The definition of a backup is a copy of the data, and it has to be a full copy to actually be a backup.
The backup copy must be separate from the production copy, and must be stored on physically separate hardware or storage media. Once the base copy is available, that copy can be used as the source for snapshots so that the primary copy is unaffected.
In order to accomplish real-time non-disruptive snapshots, the copy must be continually updated via CDP technology to capture any new information between snapshots. Instead of the traditional method of backing the data up with a bulk copy operation, data is simply always protected, continually through CDP, and periodically via the snapshots.
Data Deduplication (DD ): So far, we have virtualized everything and have implemented continuous protection for our critical data, and are making periodic snapshots of everything else. Backup is the killer application for DD, but DD also helps make DRP/BCP much more efficient. The reason backup is the killer application is because a full backup copies the same files over and over again. As an example, let's take a legal company with 500 desktops running Excel that are backed up using weekly full copies with a 30 day retention.
How many copies of excel.exe do you need to store? Without DD the first week there are 500 copies of it on tape, the next week there are 1000, the week after that there are 1500 copies, and the last week there are 2000 copies of that one file before the tapes are over written.
Now extrapolate that out to every file in the organization. You can see how it a DDs up real fast. If you do the math, using typical backup operations and retention requirements, 20TB worth of data with a 2% change rate and 3% growth rate will require over 101TB of media storage if retained over 5 weeks.
The main financial benefit of DD (besides less media and storage) is how it saves WAN bandwidth for data replication. WAN bandwidth is typically a re-occurring monthly cost, and although the cost has been going down, it's still a major part of most IT budgets, which is the reason many companies are still shipping backup tapes offsite for disaster recovery.
In summary the steps to create an internal corporate cloud.
- Virtualize everything so application and data location are irrelevant
- Continually protect, rather than use a bulk copy backup for data protection, which will change the physics of backup by removing the need to move large amounts of data at the same time.
- DD everything so it can be stored and moved efficiently
Create policies for storage tiers and data life-cycle, and apply those policies on the objects being stored (files, blocks, and tapes) so that the entire data life-cycle is automated, and everything moves to where it belongs based on that policy.
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