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Welcome to The Utility View
2012.02
Backup & Disaster Recovery - A Myriad of Choices, But You Need a SOLUTION.
TUV Feature Story > Today there is no longer a question of whether or not you should be backing up your data or preparing for a disaster. It is now well understood, in our digital world, that failing to prepare for a loss of data could literally cripple your company - but what type of solution do you need and how should you choose one (or multiple)? Read the full story >
Tips from Technical Support > Backup and Disaster Recovery may sound like a simple aspect to your IT needs, but it is most certainly not. Learn the terminology you need to so you can truly understand what your options really are.. Learn more >
What's New? > Things are always happening in today's world and specifically here at The Utility Company. Find out the latest news and learn about UtiliTV- our new YouTube channel!. Find out what's happening > |
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Here at The Utility Company (TUC), one of the most seemingly simple products our customers ask us about is Backup and Disaster Recovery, or BDR. BDR is on virtually every business owners’ mind because today’s companies rely on information and the preservation of their mission-critical data. The degree to which a company relies on its data not being compromised varies however. And their ability and willingness to pay for their data’s ongoing protection greatly affects their decision-making when it comes to choosing a backup and disaster recovery option (or options, but we’ll get to that...).
Today there is no longer a question of whether or not you should be backing up your data or preparing for a disaster. It is now well understood, in our digital world, that failing to prepare for a loss of data could literally cripple your company. The question mark then becomes, will you be out of commission/rebuilding after a breach or disaster for days? For weeks? For months? Or perhaps even permanently? To give you a (perhaps extreme) example, think of a software or gaming company that depends on their latest release to flourish. With untold amounts of person-hours and years spent to develop their next generation property, what do you think would happen if they suddenly lost all their hard work and intellectual property? Sure they could try to rebuild every nuance of it, but they would never get it 100% back to where they had it and likely wouldn’t have the capital to recreate it all from scratch had they lost all their source files to build from. For other companies, losing a customer’s financial or investment data, for example, would put them in a regulatory breach with compensatory results. And still other companies may be in a position where they could safely stand to lose untold amounts of historical archived data that they keep around for their own sakes (perhaps locally or in a safety deposit box on a tape drive) but they do still require more current data to be backed up both onsite and perhaps mirrored “in the cloud” too just to be safe.
In the matrix below, you’ll see that there are many different solutions presented to a business looking to protect their client information, their archives of historical data, their intellectual property, or simply to meet mandatory industry or federal compliance directives. For instance, you might have an existing on-site or on-premise solution such as a tape drive and/or dedicated file servers and that solution may be working just fine for you as things stand. Under the On-Site Backup column, you’ll note that there are at least 4 distinct solutions that your company might consider when pondering the state of your Backup and Disaster Recovery preparedness. In reality there could be infinitely more options.
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The solutions presented in the table above should more accurately be described as possible solutions - as BDR solutions should not be canned products - they should strive to meet the individual budgets and needs of the unique company they are built to serve. Buying a ready-made, off-the-shelf BDR solution doesn’t usually align with your company’s existing hardware and software in use today. In other words, it often supercedes what you might already have built and doesn’t give you a very good utilization of your existing technology infrastructure. As long-time readers know, TUC’s mission is to ensure that our customers only invest in the technology they require to operate, communicate and manage their business effectively. For that reason, we encourage organization to effectively use what they already have and systematically add to it or upgrade it to meet their current and future needs.
Now at this point, if you’ve looked at our matrix and aren’t overly technical by nature, then you are probably asking yourself what all this BDR terminology means. We will define the terms for you in this month’s Tech Tip so they make sense to you, but what you should take from this feature story is that there is no one right answer to meet the needs of your organization. In fact, there may be a multitude of ways to “skin the cat” so to speak. And your correct choice will depend on your willingness to spend versus your ability to spend as well as factors such as the sheer amount of data you wish to have backed up. Often times, and this may sound counter-intuitive, it may be more cost-effective for you to actually look at a more all-inclusive BDR solution instead of a combination of lesser offerings as the cost per TB of data saved can scale with volume. Your solution provider should also walk through which portions of your data absolutely need to be backed up constantly and incrementally over time as opposed to which portions (if any) can be archived and safely tucked away leaving a smaller amount of data to be backed up on an ongoing basis. The other factor your provider should bring to your attention, is the time factor - i.e. should you face a disaster, just how long can you carry on without a restoration of data taking place?
So when considering a replacement or change to your existing BDR solution, take a look at the categories within our matrix, but remember that there should always be a discovery process between you and your solution provider to determine:
a) what your company’s existing solution is (if any) and how well that is working for you
b) what your true reliance on your data is - much like a life insurance agent evaluating whether or not your family can survive comfortably (financially) without you in their world, your BDR provider should be able to tell you (and you them) just what state your company would be in if the worst did occur; then you can determine...
c) what your risk tolerance should be (given your type of business and any regulatory compliance issues you may face); which will finally lead you to determine...
d) what you should be willing to budget to mitigate that risk.
For further explanation of the variety of BDR solutions at your disposal, please visit www.theutilitycompany.com/BDR and for a breakdown of common BDR terminology, please see this month’s TUV Tech-Tip. |
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This Tech Tip is generally used to give small & medium-sized business (SMB) owners a nugget of information that will help them to use their existing technology more effectively, thereby echoing our corporate vision of how SMBs should consume technology. In this edition we'd like to help clarify the language surrounding the multitude of BDR solutions available to you.
Backup: In information technology, a backup is considered to be making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Backups have two distinct purposes. The primary purpose is to recover data after its loss, be it by data deletion or corruption. The secondary purpose of backups is to recover data from an earlier time, according to a user-defined data retention policy, typically configured within a backup application for how long copies of data are required. Though backups popularly represent a simple form of disaster recovery, and should be part of a disaster recovery plan, by themselves, backups should not alone be considered disaster recovery. Backups can be on-site or on-premise (i.e. within a company’s walls), off-site (transported to another location), in the Cloud (sent online to a repository in a secure datacenter), or virtualized where a complete redundant copy of your infrastructure is literally incrementally and continuously being built off-site.
Disaster Recovery: is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity. While business continuity involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems that support business functions.
On-site Backup: Onsite backup storage is typically the most accessible type of data storage, which can begin to restore in milliseconds time. A good example would be an internal hard disk or a disk array (maybe connected to SAN). This type of storage is very convenient and speedy, but is relatively expensive. On-site storage is quite vulnerable to being deleted or overwritten, either by accident, by intentional malevolent action, or in the wake of a data-deleting virus payload.
Cloud Backup: A remote, online, or managed backup service, sometimes marketed as cloud backup, is a service that provides users with a system for the backup and storage of computer files. Online backup providers are companies that provide this type of service to end users (or clients). Such backup services are considered a form of cloud computing. Online backup systems are typically built around a client software program that runs on a schedule, typically once a day, and usually at night while computers aren't in use. This program typically collects, compresses, encrypts, and transfers the data to the remote backup service provider's servers or off-site hardware.
Hybrid (On-site + Cloud) Backup: A combination of on-site backup systems paired with a remote service offering. This allows businesses to maintain local copies of data as well as automatic off-site copying of data to a secure secondary location.
Virtualization: In computing, virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or network resources. In terms of backup, virtualization refers to a system that can be used to recreate an existing database/server/infrastructure environment rapidly.
Snapshot/Snapshotting: A snapshot or image is the state of a virtual machine, and, generally, its storage devices, at an exact point in time. Snapshots are "taken" by simply giving an order to do so at a given time, and can be "reverted" to on demand, with the effect that the VM appears (ideally) exactly as it did when the snapshot is taken. The capability is, for example, useful as an extremely rapid backup technique, prior to a risky operation. It also provides the foundation for other advanced capabilities (discussed below).
Teleportation: Snapshots can be moved to another host machine with its own hypervisor; when the virtual machine (VM) is temporarily stopped, snapshotted, moved, and then resumed on the new host, this is known as teleportation. If the older snapshots are kept in sync regularly, this operation can be quite fast, and allow the VM to provide uninterrupted service while its prior physical host is, for example, taken down for physical maintenance.
File and Folder: As opposed to an imaging snapshot which takes a “picture’ or your entire data and infrastructure at a given point in time, file & folder backup, as the name suggests, only backs up data that is placed in folders that are pre-specified.
Imaging: Disk images were originally used for backup and disk cloning of floppy disk media, where replication or storage of an exact structure was necessary and efficient. Disk images are used heavily for duplication of optical media including DVDs, Blu-ray disks, etc. It is also used to make perfect clones of hard disks. A virtual disk may emulate any type of physical drive, such as a hard drive, tape drive, key drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD/BD/HD DVD or a network share among others. An emulated drive is typically created either in RAM for fast read/write access (known as a RAM disk), or on a hard drive. Typical uses of virtual drives include the mounting of disk images of CDs and DVDs, and the mounting of virtual hard disks for the purpose of on the fly disk encryption ("OTFE").
Bare-Metal-Restore (BMR): this is a technique in the field of data recovery and restoration where the backed up data is available in a form which allows one to restore a computer system from "bare metal", i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system. Typically, the backed up data includes the necessary operating system, applications and data components to rebuild or restore the backed up system to an entirely separate piece of hardware.
Disk imaging applications enable bare-metal restores by storing copies (images) of the entire contents of hard disks to networked or other external storage, and then writing those images to other physical disks. The disk image application itself can include an entire operating system, bootable from a live CD or network file server, which contains all the required application code to create and restore the disk images.
Bare-Metal-Restore with Incremental: Adding incremental backup to BMR means that any restoration of a database or system doesn’t need to be a reversion to an outdated snapshot of the system, it can be restored to just before the point of failure thanks to constant small updates to the base (unchanging) dataset.
Bare-Metal-Restore to Dissimilar Hardware with Incremental: In some configurations, the hardware receiving the restore needs to have an identical configuration to the hardware that was the source of the backup (no matter how old your original infrastructure may have been) but with virtualization techniques and careful planning a bare-metal restore to a hardware configuration different from the original is made possible.
To read more about Backup and Disaster Recovery, please download additional information HERE > |
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Visit our News page to learn the latest about The Utility Company including some very exciting news about our evolution as a company and what it means for you, our valued customers!
We invite you to visit our UtiliTV YouTube channel! In keeping with this month's theme, please be sure to watch the Remote Technology Overview video!
There you will find short demo videos and overviews of our various solutions to your company's IT needs including: |
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- "Remote Control Technology Made Simple" - Watch as The Utility Company's technician easily & securely connects to your PC and shows you, LIVE, how to solve your technology issue or teaches you something you may have always wanted to know. Simple, secure & timely Remote Technology Support for your small or medium-sized business! > View Overview
- "There is A NEW WAY" - Businesses and the way Information Technology (IT) helps drive them, are both changing. The Utility Company believes there is A NEW WAY to serve the needs of today's small and medium-sized businesses. A BETTER WAY. Find out more in this short overview video. > View Overview
- "Get Connected" - Let's get your office CONNECTED. Your office was SIMPLE, your office is now WIRED but it is also becoming complicated, challenging, disparate, mobile and difficult to manage. This overview explained how The Utility Company can help simplify your needs, get you into the cloud and get you CONNECTED. > View Overview
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