In the last decade there has been an enormous amount of change that has broken traditional backup and recovery techniques. From the rapid growth of data to the ubiquitous adoption of virtualization and even the use of cloud technologies, the landscape of protecting customer’s data is never something developers could have thought about a generation ago. The days when customers would stick with their tried and true backup software are over and customers are not just looking for a new vendor, but are re-architecting their entire data protection strategy.
While many changes seem obvious, there are many variables driving change in the way customers protect and manage their data center. Below are a few of my thoughts that are driving this change.
- Data growth– The ever growing backup window has pushed IT managers to look at solutions that provide real time or near real time protection while minimizing network traffic
- 24 hour Operations– Traditionally backup jobs were run at night and on weekends when network traffic was minimal. Many IT departments must now deal with applications that run 24/7.
- Virtualization– With applications now running on virtual platforms the need to recover the application is just one step. Many times there may be a need to recover the virtual infrastructure or even migrate to a virtual or physical environment.
- Transition away from tape– While many customers continue to use tape as cost effective solution, a majority of IT managers now either augment with disk based and even cloud based storage. Utilizing random access capability of disk and cloud interfaces like S3 can provide some performance and cost tradeoffs that make sense. Additionally, technologies like compression and de-duplication have come a long way and play a major role in reducing the cost of using higher cost/higher performance disk drive solutions for backup and recovery storage.
- Required downtime – For many the amount of time to recover from a disaster or even a lost file has dramatically reduced and IT managers are looking for ways to recover applications and files in seconds instead of days.
- Too many tools– As the number of tools propagated for backup, recovery, and business continuity, IT managers were forced to deal with multiple tools and methods. Today there is a need to look at ways to consolidate and provide backup and recovery, archive, and even high availability functions in a consolidated way.
I actually really like what all these changes are doing for the backup and recovery tools of today. Backup and recovery products can now do things like having a virtual standby application that can be stood up when a primary application goes down. Snapshot and de-duplication technologies have allowed customers to keep close to real time backups that allow recovery points that can be accessed in seconds allowing them to use backup and recovery tools in new ways.
This year I will be blogging about many of these and other trends and changes in the backup and recovery space and sharing my thoughts. I welcome feedback and would love to get your perspective as well, please leave me a note in the comments.
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