No Back-Ups. Really?
In a traditional corporate technology setting multiple tape backups are run at various intervals. Those physical tapes are then packaged and assumed to be moved to an off-site location. This approach, while effective five to ten years ago, presents numerous challenges as well as security concerns in our current computing environment.
First, the process of rotating media may have a significant impact on the environment. If the tapes are, in fact, being transported on a daily basis to an off-site facility, there is the carbon footprint from the provider traveling to and from the corporate location and physically transporting the tapes. And, there is the footprint of the production of tapes. Consider the following - If each server requires, at minimum, one tape in order to perform a backup and every server is backed up nightly as well as monthly, quarterly and annually, then we would be faced with 7 weekly tapes, 12 monthly tapes, 4 quarterly tapes, and 1 annual tape… 24 tapes in total per server. Multiply that by the number of servers in an organization, say 10, and you are looking at 240 tapes per year. And, these tapes are not full-proof. Like audio cassettes, you remember those don’t you, these tapes are also prone to wear. In addition to the time and cost to manage, we also have to consider the physical costs. A Sony 400 gig tape cartridge is available at an average cost of US$40, which would equate to US$9600 per year in just tapes, before you add in the expense of purchasing the drive and associated software.
Even if the cost is bearable for your organization, there are numerous security issues with this methodology. It is very difficult to prove chain of custody with tapes. They could be sitting, unsecured, waiting for the service to pick them up. What is stopping them from being stolen? Of course, you could invest in tape encryption, but are there other options?
Our organization relies on two SonicWALL CDP appliances that sit on our wire in two distributed centers to backup data. Our virtual servers are backed up to this consolidated appliance which, for all intention, has a massive hard drive inside of it. That appliance then replicates the data across the wire to a remote location. Therefore, in the event of a failure or need to recover data from backup, we can recover from the local appliance first. In the event of a true disaster, we access to the off-site appliance.
Posted on 05/11/2009 in Technology | Comments (0)
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