This is an article about Data backup and the reasons that it is so very important. In today’s global economy and extremely fast paced world it’s more important then ever to have a good backup. Backup of not only critical but almost all the data we have. Not so long ago it was only the Fortune 100 companies that seemed to have the need to data access 7x24, and they were very willing, and had the means to pay for it. Could you imagine what it would cost American Express to be down for just 1 hour then, and its unthinkable now. We are not saying that your data is less important then theirs, but who ever heard the woes of the millions of SMB’s in the same situation, heck at that time all your data could fit onto a couple of 5.25” or 3.5” floppy disks.
The reality of things today are that we have more data then ever before, not just the American Express and similar companies but all businesses. And another reality is that data will continue to grow. We also have the need to keep more data available to us at all times. Some of reason is due government regulations and other’s for fear of litigation and covering out butts just in case. Another reality is that the requirement for more storage space is also constantly growing. Capacities of disk drives are also growing at an ever quickening pace. And if that’s not hard enough to deal with the faster capacities grow the smaller the backup windows became.
We have seen some wonderful improvements in technology, with faster data through puts on tape drives, being able to stream data to multiple tape drives at the same time, LAN free and Server Free backups. Also a new technology that is up and coming is D2D2T or Disk to Disk to Tape. This is one of the most helpful of all the advancements available today in eliminating the backup window problem. Not only has the hardware advanced but the backup software as well. You can now implement a D2D or D2D2T unit in your environment and use your existing backup software package. Chances are very good that your current package already has or can be upgraded to support a VTL (Virtual Tape Library) option. This allows you to add the hardware for a D2D2t unit to your existing environment and use it, without reinventing the wheel. Simply put it makes a disk array appear to your system as a tape library complete with virtual tapes. You can then do backups at the speed of Ultra 320 SCSI, Fibre Channel or GIGE.
Now let’s take a look at some real world numbers concerning the cost of equipment vs. data loss and see the reality of it all. Let’s use a company that does about 12 million dollars a year and has 30 people on the payroll. Let’s figure a million dollars a month divided by 20 working days that gives us $50,000.00 a day. Now 30 employees at $45,000.00 a year each, that comes out to approx. $123.28 per person per day times 30 is $3698.40 a day. So if you had no permanent data you could not recover you’re looking at $53,698.00 a day loss if your system goes down. Some other very crucial numbers are related to your backup and restore. If you have a backup window of 8 hours, you need to figure at least double that amount of time for a restore, so 16 hours. This is figuring the times of conventional tape backups, and provided there are no errors encountered. Did you know that you can purchase a 3.2TB REO 4000 a D2D2T unit for MSRP of approx. $ 13,500.00? Wow that’s cheap compare to the loss of income for the loss of 1 day of business.
I have seen many different issues arise with customers over the years. Most of which were unknown to the customer until a restore was needed. Some of these issues could have been discovered and eliminated had a verify been implemented after the backup. Almost no one does a verify because it doubles the amount of time required for a backup, and the backup windows are to small. I’ve seen issues with head alignment going from 1 drive to another, when a drive that has been doing the backup for a couple years failed and the new drive could not read any of the old tapes. Also issues of incorrect, corrupted or never written data that was discovered when it was needed most because of hardware failure and a restore of lost data was attempted.
Some of the major benefits of a D2D2T unit is that you now have very fast backups, and this allows time for a verify to be ran. This also gives you a 3rd copy of your data that you can use to do a very fast restore. And a D2D2T unit can almost totally eliminate your backup window, so your expanding storage requirements are no longer a major concern. And this is also a very good choice of equipment if you’re planning a DR (Disaster Recovery) site.
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