With the volume of corporate data growing from 40 percent to 50 percent each year, backing up and protecting this valuable asset is more challenging than ever. Moreover, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other legislation requires that more information be stored for longer periods of time and be readily accessible.

The limitations of tape
The old paradigm of backing up all critical data to tape no longer is tenable for most businesses. Tape has its advantages as a storage medium and is well-suited to certain functions, but as a primary backup medium, it just doesn’t cut it. For starters, compliance regulations require the ability to search for files, but with tape you must first restore data to a volume before you can search it, a time-consuming extra step.

In addition, the process of copying data from disk to tape is highly inefficient, as writing to tape is much slower than reading or writing from disk. Backing up data to tape also consumes vast amounts of system resources, slowing production systems to unacceptable levels if the back-up takes place during business hours. With more businesses operating 24x7, there is never really a good time to backup primary system data to tape.

But perhaps the most significant disadvantage of using tape as the sole backup medium is that tape captures only a single point of recovery. If your system crashes, your business would lose all data generated since the last backup, which could be many hours’ worth. That scenario could be very expensive and painful for any business to bear.

The promise of tiered storage
Luckily, today’s technology offers businesses of all sizes an affordable way to reliably protect data without crippling business operations. Using tiered storage and disk-to-disk backups, businesses can recover lost data in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

Did you know that typically 80 percent of a businesses’ data hasn’t been accessed in the past six months? With tiered storage, a business can set up a plan or scheme to manage its data. With software tools, such as storage resource management (SRM), it is easy to identify this infrequently used data and show how frequently a dataset has been accessed and where it resides.

The theory behind tiered storage is that a businesses’ most current and in-demand data should reside on relatively high-performance disk drives, while less frequently used data can reside on a second tier of reliable, yet lower performance drives. With SRM software, you can identify and place the right data on the right tier of disk drives. Usually, businesses also copy their primary data files over to this secondary tier of storage for localized data protection.

It’s also handy to have a second set of current data available for business units to use. For example, a marketing group could do data analysis or create mailing lists from data housed on the secondary tier without affecting the performance of, say, business transactions on the primary tier.

Archiving for compliance
Once a business loads all its data onto the secondary tier, it can move that data to tape for archiving or long-term storage. Because the primary tier hosts its own copy of current frequently-accessed data, copying data from the secondary tier to tape has no impact on the production system. Typically, as soon as data files are copied onto tapes, the tapes are transported to a remote location to protect against a physical disaster, such as flood or fire, at the primary location.

Write-Once-Read-Many, or WORM technology, for tape devices is especially important in enabling companies to ensure data integrity for regulatory compliance. WORM tape cartridges cannot be overwritten or erased, and many companies depend on these devices to keep them in compliance.

Using disk-to-disk tiered storage with tape archiving delivers the best of both worlds at an affordable price. Businesses benefit from the speed and more current backups that only disk-to-disk technology can deliver, yet don’t have to invest in the most expensive storage arrays to house all their data. And because only the most important data is on the primary drives, you’ll actually get better performance for that data since there is no longer extra data occupying space on those same disks. Tape storage is relegated to the role it plays best: inexpensive archiving of data in a manner that ensures compliance and can be removed and stored safely.

In Data Protection Part 2, we’ll look at technologies that let businesses tailor the specific types of data protection they need.

Dell has the data protection products and services you need
Whether your company’s data is attached directly to a server or resides within a storage area network, Dell can help ensure that it’s protected. For tape backups, Dell offers single tape drives, tape automation systems ideal for multiple or remote application servers, and rackable tape library systems with autoload capability for backing up SANs. Dell’s PowerVault disk storage devices provide easy-to-implement, powerful near-line storage, and Dell/EMC storage systems are the ideal platforms for tiered storage, with outstanding performance, scalability, reliability and choice of host connectivity.

Dell can help businesses of all sizes centralize and simplify managing the process of protecting their data with a wide range of data archiving, backup, replication and storage resource management software. Dell is an authorized reseller of storage software by industry leaders like CommVault, EMC Legato, Symantec, Yosemite, and NSI.

Dell also offers a focused portfolio of archiving, backup and recovery services to help businesses deploy a solution to protect data over its entire lifecycle.