Hurricane season has arrived. Homeowners near the coasts are undoubtedly getting ready to board up their windows and prepare for violent winds and rains, and businesses should be considering the unthinkable too. Losing access to critical data can be crippling for enterprises - in some cases it costs $18,000 per hour. Granted, data center disasters are often far more mundane. Instead of a hurricane, a water pipe might break in the building, or critical software may become corrupted. When it comes to disaster recovery planning, is your business doing enough?
To protect against such disasters, most enterprises are doing backups. The most basic form is the simple backup, in which the system makes regular, additional copies of data. The next step is versioned copies. In this case, there is one full backup of a given file, then incremental ones that add up to the most recent version.
Versioning is a necessity. Without it, businesses would be backing up full copies every time. That means they’d be storing – and paying for - far too much excess data. But versioning also has problems of its own. If disaster does strike, the restore time with standard disaster recovery solutions is far too long. The backup software has to go back to the last full version of the file, then add all the versions to it to get to the most recent, complete file. This is time-consuming even when the data is just being pulled back from local servers.
The reality, though, is that businesses shouldn’t be doing purely local backup because this doesn’t protect against massive corruption, pipes bursting, or floods. That’s why most enterprises back up to tape. Once a week they ship the backup tapes off-premises. Iron Mountain and others offer this service, and it is easy and affordable.
The problem is that it only compounds the restore time.
Think of it like cleaning up a workbench. Imagine you’ve got all your tools spread out on the table – screwdrivers, drill bits, saw-blades, hammers, etc. Now, you can easily shovel them all into a few boxes, close the lids, and enjoy the satisfaction of a visually-uncluttered workspace. But what happens when you need a specific tool? It will take you forever to find it.
With tape-based restores, business-critical data is safe from local disasters, but it is extremely inconvenient and time-consuming to get that data back. All those tapes need to be shipped. Then all the files need to be restored to their most recent, accurate versions, which doesn’t always happen. This is too much risk for most enterprises, too much wasted time, and too many impatient employees, who want their system up and running ASAP.
The benefit of cloud storage is that there is no need to worry about these time-consuming, error-prone disaster recovery solutions. The storage system and the backup are the same creature.
For example, with the Nasuni Filer, file systems can be restored in just 15 minutes. End-users will have complete access to their data - that data will then be called back from the cloud and reinstantiated locally as needed. This is the key: End-users get immediate access to the data even if the data isn’t there. That’s why cloud storage gateways are so fast.
We’ll be going into more detail on these and other disaster recovery planning issues in a forthcoming white paper. But if you’re interested in learning more soon, please join our CEO, Andres Rodriguez, for a disaster recovery webinar today - Thursday, August 12th - at 12:00 PM EDT. Andres will be reviewing a few of these ideas, and going into more detail on the pros and cons of various disaster recovery solutions.
Any questions? We’re always happy to hear from you: feedback@nasuni.com.