Great opportunity to learn from one of the best in the business when it comes to the protection and recovery of Exchange – Devin Ganger, Exchange MVP, Microsoft Certified Master Exchange 2007 and author of multiple books and Microsoft white papers will be hosting a webcast called “Overcoming Exchange Failures – Insights from an Industry Expert” this Wednesday, 9/23 at 11am Pacific.
If Exchange is closely tied to your organization’s ability to generate revenue or provide high levels of customer service, this is a great session for you to join! Devin will share guidelines for Exchange protection and recovery to address issues including:
over-running Exchange backup windows
media failures
database corruption
and loss of an entire Exchange Server
I’ll be joining Devin during this webcast to run NetVault: FASTRecover through its paces, which includes Virtual On-Demand Recovery (VODR). With VODR, you are able to make very large data objects available for use almost immediately after recovery has been initiated. Access to recovered data is made available as soon as a brief recovery setup phase has been completed – without waiting for the full recovery to complete. Tune in and watch.
With the constant evolution of data protection technology, combined with the increased use of disk-based technology as the prime media in data protection, the concept of “Recovery Point Objective” is now being factored into data protection plans at even the smallest IT departments.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to how long it takes to recover your data and applications in the event of a system outage or data loss.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) refers to how granular your data recovery can be. Can you go back to the very last change or is the most recent recoverable version of a file - hours or even days old – acceptable?
In classic backup and recovery strategies, RTO has been the concept that has preoccupied most people responsible for data protection. If something goes wrong how quickly can I recover? Until very recently this question would underpin the recovery plans of the vast majority of requirements that came up across Asia. This held true from SME-type companies right through to large enterprises.
In the last 18 months, it is becoming increasingly common to see IT managers asking about RPO. Sometimes they do not use this exact terminology, but the requirement is similar. How can I ensure I record every change to all of my data and still have the ability to recover or roll back to any previous version of that has been created? In effect, this is what CDP promises to deliver, however, be careful – not all CDP is created equally. Some so-called “CDP” offerings are really continuous snapshots with a possibility that data changes between snapshots will not be recorded and hence will not be recoverable.
So why is RPO becoming as important as RTO?
Compliance is a big issue and drives some of the demand and interest in granular RPO. However, in smaller companies where compliance is still not a big prerequisite, we are still seeing big interest in technologies that deliver granular RPO. I believe some of the reasons relate to vendor messaging. Many vendors now offer a CDP type technology so the messaging is being pushed wide and far. However, it goes further than that. Implementing a technology that delivers truly granular RPO now costs little more – and sometimes less – than a traditional backup offering. This means that the cost benefits and business benefits really make sense for even the smallest companies.
Imagine a web design company, where for a few thousand dollars the IT manager can implement a solution that allows the designer to roll back to any previous version of a document they are working on. The business benefits in that instance alone are hard to ignore.
Further, if we consider that the vast majoirty of recovery requirements are for individual files, not complete system recoveries, we can also see that RPO-based technologies also assist in the pursuit of better RTO.
In truth, one is not more important than the other; the two concepts complement each other. Vendors will push the technology that suits their aims, but the truth is as cost comes down, all data protection strategies should combine technologies that deal with both of these concepts.
Gone are the days when companies would make a determination on what platforms they were going to implement within their organization and then determine the best applications on that platform. Today, applications are driving the platforms that are adopted within many environments and making heterogeneous operations much more commonplace. The practice of separate solutions for different platforms ultimately is insufficient and costly. In addition, this practice cannot provide one unified picture that integrates status, functionality, administration and reporting of the separate platforms.
Today’s enterprises need centralized, integrated, OS-agnostic data protection to effectively safeguard mixed-platform environments. And backup software now needs to possess almost a transcendental quality to it in that it must also integrate with multiple backup devices – old and new. Regardless of whether your priority is simple backup and recovery or far-reaching business continuity, it’s important to find solutions that are platform independent so they work seamlessly across all platforms. The need to move and protect data regardless of its source is spawning a new breed of heterogeneous data integration to keep hardware costs down and allow you to streamline all data protection through one solution.
What to avoid:
OS-constrained data protection solutions. In order to make separate solutions work together, time-constrained IT staffers are forced to write additional and/or manual scripts to conduct these backup and recovery procedures for applications that are not being protected properly by OS-constrained data protection solutions.
Isolated “islands” of data protection. While multiple data protection solutions can provide a certain level of data protection, it also creates an isolated “island,” which comes with its own administration and management nightmares and still has data loss exposure in real-time production environments.
Checklist for keeping data protection simple:
Does your data protection solution protect multiple distributions of OS platforms? Regardless of which backup and recovery solution you decide to implement to protect your data, it needs to be a solution that can handle the multiple distributions of Linux, Windows, Mac OS and UNIX.
Does your data protection solution support the future growth of your IT environment? In this economic environment, the last thing you need to do is choose your data protection solution, and then have to invest in additional hardware and or software to properly support it. Multi-platform backup and recovery is the first line of defense in ensuring the well-being and future growth of IT environments.
Are you providing a centralized, OS-agnostic data protection strategy? The proliferation of separate solutions for different platforms ultimately is insufficient and costly. In addition, this practice cannot provide one unified picture that integrates status, functionality, administration and reporting of the separate platforms.
In this podcast Senior VP Ken Horner talks about how he began his career in storage and how the industry has evolved over the last 25 years.
Ken was recently named a finalist in the 2009 American Business Awards for outstanding executive leadership in computer software. He has led BakBone through corporate partnerships, worldwide marketing initiatives, technology acquisitions and global strategic alliances.
