Challenges of Backup and Recovery

BANGALORE, INDIA: Tape is just not able to handle the ever-growing data volumes in organizations. We interacted with P.K.Gupta, Director and Chief Architect, BRS Practice-APJ, EMC to understand the challenges organizations face in backup and recovery, the RoI of using disk over tape for backup, and much more.

Q. What are some of the challenges faced by organizations with respect to backup and recovery?

A. It's a well known fact that data is growing tremendously in every organization, but even more interesting is the fact that if data grows from say 1 to 2 TB, then its backup data grows many times this value! This was one of the findings of a recent Forrester research report on the state of backup and recovery amongst organizations in the APJ region.

It was based on a survey of 550 organizations across APJ, out of which 70 were large Indian organizations. The logic for this is simple. Companies do weekly, daily, monthly and annual backups, and are required to archive 7-8 years of data. As a result, backup data ends up being 6-7 times of the actual data we backup.

The challenges faced by Indian organizations with respect to backup and recovery are different from the rest of Asia. While the primary challenge for Indian organizations is related to optimization of the storage and backup infrastructure itself, for the rest of Asia, the primary challenge is managing data growth. 52% of organizations in rest of Asia said this, while only 27% of the Indian respondents gave this as their key challenge.

The number 3 challenge related to backup and recovery is dealing with natural disasters, thanks to the slew of disasters that struck the world in 2011. Apparently, 2011 was the biggest year of natural disasters, which has changed a lot of things.

Also read: Indian SMBs need to enlarge their base

A lot of customers who used to backup data on tapes were not able to restore them, not because the tapes were corrupt, but because they couldn't even send people to get the tapes as their data centers were in the basement. Japan for instance, was the worst hit. Due to the Tsunami and earthquakes, even roads were broken, due to which companies couldn't send their people to get the tapes. Due to this, online disaster recovery has become very popular since the last 6-8 months.

The 4th challenge being faced by organizations is related to backup as a service. While we have been talking a lot about cloud computing, but it's only over the last 4-5 months that people have seriously started considering it and started putting non-critical data on the cloud. This is happening because over time, people are finding it increasingly difficult to manage large volumes of data.

For instance, the Oracle databases and their instances that were maintained by companies used to be a terabyte or half. Now, their size has reached double digit TBs. EMC for instance, has customers who have single Oracle instances of 40 TB. Due to this, backing them up within a 24 hour window is just not possible.

Q. Advancements in technology have improved data replication and backup speeds. Are they not sufficient to deal with growing data volumes?

A. People have been doing backups since 1942 when backup meant tapes, and unfortunately, most people still people follow the same pattern. This just doesn't help because now, 90% of data in a lot of organization is in digital format and not paper. Even your credit card and mobile bills for instance, are in digital form. The volumes have grown so much that the next production cycle starts even before the previous backup has been done. Under such a situation, tape becomes insufficient. People want quick backups.

Moreover, now it is recovery that has become extremely importance. The focus is on how fast we can recover. So, people are looking for online replication. There are products in the market that will start the replication as soon as the backup starts. So your DR is ready instantly as a result. Moreover, it's backed up to a drive and not tape, using a technology called called disk to disk de-duplication.