Business Continuity & Backup systems
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Business Continuity & Backup systems
The key task in developing a business continuity strategy for any modern company is to ensure the fail-safe operation of the computer infrastructure. In turn, while building a fault-tolerant computer system, it always comes to a reliable mechanism of data backup.
Not long ago the most common solution for backups making and storing were tape drives – tape streamers or robotic tape storages – tape libraries. Indeed, the tape has a minimal data storage cost today, and greater amount of information, the more it becomes obvious. Nevertheless, data storage tape has several disadvantages that can be critical for fail-safely functioning infrastructure.
So then, despite the fact that the read/write speed of modern streamers is comparable to hard disks’ speed, they surrender to them in access speed. A delay when addressing data tape library can amount several minutes, what can be prohibitively long for the service’s disaster recovery in the event of critical failure. In addition, tape drives are not very reliable. According to a research done by ESG, about a quarter of companies using tape backup complains to failures of the data backup process. This discredits seriously use of tape drives and tape libraries as the primary and the one only backup option and makes them near inapplicable to ensure business continuity.
Pervasive desktop and server virtualization, along with data centers’ transfer to the cloud-based infrastructure, completely changed the strategy of building of high availability systems. First, the use of virtualization tools provides enormous flexibility in the data redundancy implementation. Hard disk drives of shared storages are used as backup carriers, because they have minimum time access to data compared with tape device. This way, both the record of backup images, and their recovery can be carried out «on the fly.» This process is transparent to the user in most cases. Advanced backup algorithms permit instantaneous «snapshots» of virtual machines without interrupting their work and provide data relevancy at any time.
Flexibility and simplicity of virtual resources reconfiguration allow minimizing downtime in the event of failure. With a pre-elaborated and carefully implemented strategy of backup, virtual machine’s performance can be restored in the shortest possible time: in case of failure of a server with the image of a running virtual machine, a reserve one, that holds the mirror copy of the image, instantly undertakes its function.
As a rule, data storage and processing in such systems are decentralized and geographically separated, as natural disasters are among main risk factors. In addition, to ensure reliability the simultaneous replication of backup images is carried to multiple storage devices (which can also be separated geographically). Thus, even in case of failure of a large part of equipment, backup data remains intact.
The only parameter, according to which the hard drive system of data backup is inferior to the tape storage, is the total cost of ownership (TCO). Difference in the cost of installation and maintenance of network and tape storage can be by several digits, and grow with the growth of a data volume. As a comparison: according to the Clipper Notes’ estimations, the total cost of ownership of a storage of 6.6 petabytes is about $ 15 million/five years in case of implementation in the form of a disk system, or about $ 700.000 in the form of a tape library. For this reason there are also hybrid backup systems – they use tape libraries as an auxiliary storage instead of expensive hard disks systems.
However, this research does not take into account the main factor of Business Continuity strategy – the cost of system downtime. In some applications where several minutes of downtime can become critical, the cost of maintenance and service of backup system is very reasonable.
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