With more data, growing costs and increased complexity, mid-market businesses face the most challenging data environment yet. So, are five ways that CTOs can save time and money while keeping their data safe this year.

The looming data backup crisis is the result of a hodgepodge of hardware and software products from multiple vendors. What I’m identifying here are the most important considerations for all CTOs in 2010 as they take on this data backup burden.

Below are five easy ways CTOs can save time and money while keeping data secure:

1. Virtualization moves to mid-market
Traditionally, virtualization has primarily caught on in large enterprises. However, in 2010, this technology will develop a greater presence in the mid-market resulting in the need for high-performance storage solutions. CTOs should look to virtualization to boost server and storage capabilities allowing them to cut spending on server hardware and increase efficiencies.

2. Forget disaster recovery; Think disaster planning
As the economy recovers, it is more important than ever for mid-market companies to have a solid disaster recovery plan in place. Start planning for any potential threats to business continuity, realizing not just natural disasters, but human errors, disgruntled employees and network failures can also cause interruption or data loss. It is not enough to recover after a disaster strikes. Anticipate interruptions and plan accordingly ahead of time.

3. More remote office/branch office (ROBO) data equals more vulnerability
Ensuring the security of the ROBO and the data they store is an increasing problem. More focus must be placed on protecting a company’s ROBO data. As more data moves from the datacenter to the remote office, the more important it is to ensure it’s not vulnerable.

4. Stop being duped by the wrong de-dupe
In 2010, companies will realize they are duping data that should never have been duped in the first place. De-duplication, if done incorrectly, carries with it high costs, mountains of duplicated data and wasted time. De-duping excess data created by a backup solution is akin to washing all of the clothes in your closet every day, whether they are dirty or not. Instead, companies will turn to solutions that back up only each day’s new data.

5. Data security is a must
By this time next year, the digital universe will be 10 times bigger than it was just three years ago. With more data comes more attacks on mid-market data centers and branch offices. These attacks will expose more records than ever before to abuse. Ensuring the security of remote and branch offices and the data they store is just one of the growing problems. More than ever, make sure your data is secure.

The new year will bring new challenges. But, if CTOs can implement these five strategies, they’ll have a greener, more cost effective and secure infrastructure.

As the new year dawns I’m trying to figure out what cloud storage means to STORServer.  As it turns out we had cloud storage before cloud storage was cool.  We’ve been able to do cloud communication between two STORServers and provide cloud disaster recovery for years so it isn’t really new for us.

So is cloud storage really anything?

Perhaps it is.  We will offer additional cloud options in our STORServer Backup Appliance product and in fact we are investigating these even now.  What will this mean for us?  An expanded suite of solutions that our customers can exploit.  What will this mean to you?  It depends.  If you have the bandwidth than doing disaster recovery via the cloud may make sense for you.  But you should always remember the most effective disaster recovery method may still be based on tape.  And it is almost certainly less expensive.

So I guess I’ll just keep thinking about what cloud storage means to us and realize that the notion is probably continuing to evolve.

How many companies will provide a money back guarantee on a backup solution for your business?  STORServer does.

What does that mean? 

Let us design a backup solution for your environment.  We’ll need you to fill out a spreadsheet with information about the number of servers, the amount of data, processors and cores.  From that one of our solutions architects will generate the ideal combination of performance and storage options to meet your specific requirements.

Issue a Purchase Order to your reseller for the solution.  Within 30 days it will be delivered to your site and installed by one of our specialists.  You will be trained on its day-to-day operation.

Use your solution for 30 days after installation.  If you don’t like it for any reason call us and we’ll send you return shipping labels (remember to keep the boxes) and you can ship it back to us.  If you do like it, pay the invoice.  You have successfully solved your backup problem once and for all.

It’s easy.  Takes about an hour to fill out the spreadsheet, an hour or two to design a solution that is right for you, a couple of weeks for it to arrive and about four hours for you to decide you love it!  The thirty days is a formality!

What have you go to lose?

Nobody else can offer this: it would take everyone else 60 days to figure out what you need, and at least another sixty days to ship and install it.  The good news is it would only take you a day to realize you don’t like it!

Do you have some end of year money?  There is still time to wipe this problem from your plate once and for all.

12/18/2009
Information Management
Top Data Center DR Issues
http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/data_center_disaster_recovery-10016725-1.html

12/2/2009
CTO Edge
Disaster Recovery Is All About Imagination
http://www.ctoedge.com/content/disaster-recovery-all-about-imagination

11/23/2009
Computer Technology Review
Why Do I Hate Tape Backup?
http://wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8019:why-do-i-hate-tape-backup&catid=99:cover-story&Itemid=270101

11/20/2009
Processor
Recover From a Flooded Data Center
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P3128/10bp28/10bp28.asp&guid

11/1/2009
Business TechEdge
No Amount of Money Will Bring Back Your Data
http://techedgemag.com/content/ContentCT.asp?P=300

11/08/2009
Enterprise Systems
Three Hidden Costs of Backup
http://esj.com/articles/2009/09/08/hidden-costs-backup.aspx?sc_lang=en

07/06/2009
Enterprise Management Quarterly
Why Are My Backups Still Killing Me?
http://www.emqus.com/index.php?/emq/article/why_are_my_backups_still_killing_me_456

6/5/2009
Processor
Best Practices for Backups
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3116%2F25p16%2F25p16.asp

4/29/2009
Network Computing
The Challenge of Automating Data Backups
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/backup-recovery/the-challenge-of-automating-data-backups.php

3/31/2009
Disaster Recovery Journal
Is Rip and Replace the Best Solution?
http://www.drj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2585&Itemid=429

03/23/2009
SearchDisasterRecovery.com
Using a tabletop exercise for disaster recovery planning
http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid190_gci1351368_mem1,00.html

3/10/2009
eWEEK
Can Business Continuity Handle Unfettered Data Growth?
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Can-Business-Continuity-Handle-Unfettered-Data-Growth/3/

3/4/2009
bMighty.com
Q&A With STORServer’s Kelly Lipp: Disaster Recovery Requires More Than Data Recovery
http://bmighty.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215600343

2/6/2009
Processor
Resolving Disaster Recovery Problems
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=aticles%2Fp3106%2F20p06%2F20p06%2F20p06.asp

From CommVault’s description: (This isn’t the same as copying someone’s work and calling it their own.  I attributed it to the original source and put quotation marks around it.  I’m not being two faced!!)

“Overview

As the name suggests, a synthetic full backup is a synthesized backup. It is created from the most recent full backup (i.e., standard or synthetic) and subsequent incremental and/or differential backups. The resulting synthetic full backup is identical to what would have been created had the last backup for the subclient been a full backup. Unlike full, incremental, and differential backups, a synthetic full backup does not actually transfer data from a client computer to the backup media. In this sense it is not really a backup at all, rather a backup consolidator.

Because synthetic full backups consolidate backup data into one archive file, they provide a means of enhancing restore performance, particularly when a given full backup cycle contains many incremental backups. For a discussion on the benefits of data consolidation, see Comparing Backup Types.

An example of the usefulness of synthetic full backups is the case where a Client is remotely located from a MediaAgent, with a WAN connection that is limited in bandwidth. In such a case, you may not want to perform full backups on a regular basis across the WAN, but you do want a archive file of your backup data to enhance restore performance.

Synthetic full backups are treated by the system as standard full backups. As a result, they delineate full backup cycles in the same manner as standard backups. This is an important point to remember, since retention periods are defined in part by the number of full backup cycles. Using synthetic full backups in an unguided manner may cause the unintentional expiration of data.

Synthetic full backups can either be started manually or scheduled to occur at regular intervals. Scheduling allows you to incorporate synthetic full backups into your regular backup schedules as described in Using Synthetic Full Backups.”

——————————-

Did that give anyone else a headache.  It did me.  A couple of points:

“Using synthetic full backups in an unguided manner may cause the unintentional expiration of data.”

Huh?  Wow.  So if you use this, you may lose data?  And what if you need the ability to select other than the most recently backed up copy?  Seems like an either/or situation to me.  Very flexible…

“Because synthetic full backups consolidate backup data into one archive file…”

Backups are not archives!!!  Mixing the terminology is flat wrong.

“This is an important point to remember, since retention periods are defined in part by the number of full backup cycles…”

Shouldn’t retention cycles be described based on file type and on a business requirements rather than on a tape rotation cycle?  And further, what happens if you mix data types and retention policies?  Won’t that take two backups (or more) to accomplish?  Huh?

“particularly when a given full backup cycle contains many incremental backups…”

What if one wants to only run incrementals backups?  This statement implies that regardless of using this “technology” (and is this really technology or a hack masquerading as technology?), one must occasionally resort to a full backup.  Can you imagine the processing required if you had 50 or 60 incremental backups to “consolidate”?  You’de be at that for days.

And what if you were using one of those very clever deduplication devices?  Can you imagine the re-duplication deduplication cycles necessary to generate a “synthetic” full?  We call this the dedupedy redupedy doo phenomena.  Clever.

How many people actually do this and what is the impact on the backup server when you do?  What’s the longest time between full backups that this actually works (if anyone is using it)?  Has anyone ever lost data as indicated is possible?  Is this “technology” just a check box item in order to compete against a product that actually has technology to eliminate the need for full backups (and synthetic full backups?

The answers? Zero and not much(since it isn’t actually used), Zero (since nobody uses it), Well, I guess not since nobody uses it, Yes.

What a mess.

I got a note from our marketing folks the other day with a link to a competitors website and a whitepaper that looked suspiciously like one I wrote. I mean, more than just a little bit like. A lot like!

Should I be flatterd or angry? What is the worth of my original work?

BTW, the offending party is the company formerly known as “the opposite of under” Land.

Describe your environment to us.  Describe your ideal solution.  Let’s see if we can build it.  It may not involve a STORServer at all! 

Perhaps this can morph into a more general conversation about backup/restore techniques and tricks.

Often, our inability to solve this problem stems from our inability to think outside our existing box.  I had a discussion with one of our channel sales engineers this morning.  During the course, we completely changed the way we viewed a potential solution.  The key was two of us kicking it around.

One thing I do know for sure: we at STORServer have designed and implemented more backup solutions than most of you have.  Use our expertise!

Bring it on folks!

If only you didn’t do a full backup every week, there wouldn’t be anything to deduplicate.  So don’t do that in the first place and you don’t need dedup in the second place.

There was a great post in an EMC blog about the need to have three or four distinct EMC products to accomplish deduplication.  THREE or FOUR!  Can you imagine how much fun that would be to implement?  And it wouldn’t be necessary if EMC didn’t duplicate the data for you.  Though I guess that makes sense: create a problem and for you customer and then charge them money to solve it.  Hmmmm.  Maybe we have the wrong idea about this.  NOT!

Here’s the analogy: each Sunday, you take all the clothes out of your closet and wash them whether they’ve been worn or not.  That doesn’t make any sense.  Neither does backing up all the data in your environment every week whether it has been changed or not.

STORServer doesn’t duplicate data in the first place (to the extent other products do) and when we do duplicate it (in the case of a database for instance), we keep far fewer versions (reducing the duplication), or we will (in the future) deploy the TSM deduplication engine.

Don’t complicate your life.  Don’t duplicate (so much) in the first place and don’t spend a nickel deduplicating now!  There is a better way.

Topic theme: find something I’ve written that you think is bull$%$# and call me out on it!  I’ll either ignore you, respond to you, or find some friends!