Backup & Beyond (mostly beyond)

Cloud storage vendors got a new marketing message, “data on the cloud doesn’t require backup since we replicate the data to at least two different zones or locations”.  There is always this assumption amongst some Storage industry folks that ‘Storage is the new backup’.  If they say that “data is being backed” up just because the data is in the cloud which replicates it to multiple locations then they do not understand the difference between raw storage and backups.

According to a recent blog by W Curtis Preston “Good backup is much more than mere data protection: Backup must manage data, not just protect it. No basic storage technology will eliminate a real backup solution.” Yes, ‘Backup is Backup’ and Cloud Storage is all about offering raw storage blended with replication for better reliability.

Replication is a great idea since it offers redundancy for the storage and can reduce the risk of losing data. But it is not a life time data protection and management strategy. It would be very much relevant to recall my previous blog on Raw Storage Vs Backup that “Data Backup is lot more than raw storage as there is a backup application which intelligently processes the data and ensures data protection with the help of features like versioning, file retention, customized restore process etc. On top of that a backup application offers a completely automated process with protection for millions of files with sophisticated monitoring, reporting and management features to identify problems if any and troubleshoot quickly”.

Cloud Storage solutions are another form of reliable and scalable storage that can be used by advanced backup solutions and cloud storage alone, whatever the reliability offered is, by itself cannot be a complete backup strategy for businesses. If anyone thinks backups are expensive and cloud storage is the cheapest way to backup, remember that cloud storage is not about data management and protection (backups), but it is only another convenient option for storage. That should explain the reason raw storage offered by cloud storage vendors look much cheaper than a complete backup storage offered by online backup service providers.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Storing digital data is the prime objective of any data center;  the question is for how long the data is going to be stored. Almost all of us are storing our digital data on an offsite data center by the means of emails, photos, videos etc. I always had this thought in my mind that for how long would our personal data be stored and preserved. Say, if after some 150 or 200 years our great (great) grand children want to access the information, do they have the option to do that? This is not a problem for just an individual, but it is also of importance for the data that belong to Government agencies and Big Institutions.

According to Strategic Research Findings , as of 2004, only a few Government agencies have set some storage specific requirements like “If data is stored on disk, it has to be migrated to a new disk drives every 3 years and if the data is stored on tape, it has to be migrated every 5 years etc.”. Now this kind of data management practice leaves us with two huge and urgent gaps that require attention.  First, the current practice cannot preserve data reliably for the long term. Second, the explosion of the amount of information and data being kept long term make the cost and complexity of keeping digital information prohibitively high leave alone the cost involved in periodic migration.

Let’s analyze the above problem with simple example.  Let’s say if a data center has 1.0 Peta byte of data today that it needs to store for 100 years.  After 3 years it will have 1.50 PB of data assuming even a modest 10% annual growth rate. In the third year, for reliable and long term storage, it needs to migrate all of year one’s data to a new disk storage system. According to a press release by incipient , the average cost of migrating 1 Terabyte of data is about $5000. And a datacenter with 1 PB of storage under management spends $1.25 Million annually on data migration operations, assuming about 25% of data is migrated to new storage every year. And on top of that most of these data migrations are incredibly time consuming.

Now if we add parallel demands of migration , in a few years time, we would run out of time and money. Unless the datacenter is properly funded and equipped with sufficient workforce, this migration process for preserving data for 100s of years can’t be sustained. Organizations who understand this problem are now working on the so called ‘Information Life Cycle Management’ which involves following the best practices required for storing and managing data for life time.

Thousand years ago, people used Stylus and Papyrus for storing information which had its own disadvantages and because of that we were unable to retrieve all that information today. We just hope that the same problem does not happen after thousand years from now.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.