Get Organized: An Integrated Approach to Archive and Backup

Sometimes technology evolves in large steps, with radically new technologies—and sometimes technology evolves subtly. Breakthrough technologies define themselves clearly as new. Major changes in technological requirements, however, aren’t as obvious during a subtle evolution process.

Data backup is an excellent example of the slower evolutionary process. Until recent years, tape automation has been served admirably as the standard for backup. However, given the continuous growth of data and the demands made on it, tape alone may no longer be the complete solution.

Some of the changes in the data protection arena include:

• Constant data growth, with no limit in sight.
• Disk, which has played an increasingly important role in short-term and sometimes medium-term data backup.
• Encryption, which has stepped up in importance, given recent headlines of lost tapes resulting in corporate liability.
• Rapid access to email and other data; the new need to access data quickly developed to meet post-Enron litigation demands.

Using just these few examples, we’ve moved from a data center with a tape library, to a data center that looks like this:

This approach works, but it also adds multiple disparate elements: several applications, appliances, and dedicated hardware. This non-integrated, piecemeal approach makes data centers even harder to manage, with more applications to master, more space and power dedicated to individual appliances, servers dedicated to isolated applications, and added service contract costs and associated administrative effort.

This technology creep clutters and complicates data centers and their administration. Is it increasingly evident that current methods of data archive and backup don’t work together, and don’t work efficiently. It’s time for a different approach.