Emergency service
- Article 24 of 26
- M-iD, October 2005
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The solution is to use storage area networks (SANs), since that effectively takes the bottleneck away from the server. Kevin Perrett, storage architect for storage vendor FalconStor, says that it is possible to put together an iSCSI based SAN for £3,000-4,000.
"Essentially, all you need is a big bunch of disks and an iSCSI server," he claims. Using iSCSI rather than fibre channel connectivity technology reduces costs since existing network specialists already have the necessary skills. "One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is in the actual management of back-ups. Organisations don't accurately account for the amount of work and physical labour involved in controlling back-up systems," warns BT's Voo.
Using a storage area network also prevents another common problem with back-ups: use of network bandwidth. Since the storage area network provides a separate network, data no longer swamps the network and so the organisation no longer has to compress all its back-up operations into periods when few staff are using the network.
Continuous replication can be used for disaster recovery and business continuity as well. By having a separate site or separate system that is a duplicate of the main system, the business can continue operating even in the event of system failure or something calamitous affecting the main site. 'Metro storage area networks', which use leased lines to connect disk systems within the same system, are also becoming more viable options for organisations that want to the ability to recover from localised problems.
However, if there is a high data churn, the bandwidth necessary for continuous replication is unlikely to be within any but a handful of organisations' budgets, according to ADIC's Steve Mackey.
"Metro's not for data replication. There are quite a lot of links available, but if you look at the bandwidth, it's not up to continuous replication, even asynchronous replication, so you have to rely on tape," he says. This is especially true for long-distance replication, with back-up sites 50 kilometres or more away from the main site - necessary to avoid the worst disasters. Hurricane Katrina, for instance, affected an area larger than the size of Great Britain.
Organisations should pick a subset of their data to back up continuously and then use other means to create back-ups of less vital data. An offsite continuous backup is still affordable in many instances, with companies such as BT, Iron Mountain, DataFort and PC World Business offering schemes that even relatively small organisations can afford.
BT's Voo highlights aggregated services for groups of small businesses, starting at £2 per month, per gigabyte for a fully managed service with inclusive bandwidth of between 128 Kilobits per second (Kbps) and 256Kbps. If that is too expensive, the old fallback of tapes stored offsite is always available, although it is by no means the best, the most secure or the most foolproof option.
Records management
Most notably absent in most back-up strategies is a way to ensure back-ups fit within established records management processes and procedures.
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