In Data Protection Part 1, we looked at tiered storage environments as a way to cost-effectively backup data onto disk and tape without bogging down production systems. Now let’s look at some ways to manage the process of storing data to disk.

The premise behind data protection is that the best way to protect data is to copy it and store the copies elsewhere. The more frequently you copy data, the less data is at risk for being lost in case of disaster. There are several ways to copy data, each with its benefits and operating costs.

To choose the right combinations for your business, you need to consider your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Simply put, the RPO is the last point from which you are comfortable recovering. In other words, how much data are you willing to lose – five minutes, one hour, one day?

The RTO represents the time it will actually take you to recover the data and resume business operations based on your RPO. Typically the lower the RPO, the less time it will take you to recover data and operations, and the more expensive the solution will be. With these two considerations in mind, you can make the right decisions on policies and technologies to best protect your data.

Remember, not all data is created equal. You may have some critical data that needs very low RPOs and RTOs, along with other data that doesn’t change often and therefore can have much higher RPOs and RTOs.

Snapshots for quick recovery

To ensure critical data isn’t lost in the event of equipment failure or other disaster, many businesses use a technology known at snapshotting. As its name implies, snapshotting takes a picture of live data at a given point in time and stores it, usually as an online, logical volume-based back-up.

One benefit of snapshotting is that, as its name implies, it takes but a moment to complete. Because snapshots create a list of pointers back to blocks of data in the live volume, the process consumes minimal disk space. A business can set up its systems to take snapshots of data according to a schedule, eliminating the need for time-consuming backups that impede business operations. Another advantage is that snapshots take far less space than replicating an entire volume, so you don’t need as much disk space when implementing snapshots.

Snapshotting applications enable multiple active snapshots of data to exist and be stored anywhere on the network. In the event local data is corrupted or accidentally deleted, the snapshot can be retrieved and copied back into the live volume. Snapshot data also can be used for business purposes, not just as a backup. For example, parts of the company database could be snapshotted onto another volume and accessed by the marketing or finance departments to do business analysis. This improves overall productivity by allowing multiple uses of the same data set without affecting production data and throughput.

Virtual Tape Libraries: protecting your investment

For companies that are already using a tape backup system, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) can reduce the time needed to restore data. A VTL enables a business to use its existing tape backup software and scheduling policies and use a disk array as the primary backup medium. In effect, the VTL appliance convinces your backup application that the disk array is a tape library. With the low cost of today’s Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives, which have a lower per-gigabyte cost than DLT IV tapes, companies can cost-effectively use virtual tape libraries to improve performance of backup and recovery operations.

Continuous Data Protection for the most mission-critical applications

Depending on the granularity of protection you require, businesses have the option to snapshot data throughout the day or deploy a more sophisticated technology called Continuous Data Protection (CDP). With CDP, all changes to data associated with a particular group of applications are stored at a second location.

CDP is best-suited for databases that run continuously, would have a major business impact if they went down, and are too large to back up conveniently. Because CDP continuously records all data written to disk, there are no backup schedules. In effect, CDP is a process of ongoing data backup, but one that uses minimal system resources.

Although CDP enables data to be restored and recovered from any previous point in time, as opposed to a scheduled point in time, it should not be considered a Disaster Recovery solution. Rather, CDP if focused on eliminating data loss from database corruption, viruses and accidental deletion, and enabling businesses to get their applications back online quickly.

The bottom line

Has your business tried to estimate the costs of not being able to restore lost data? These costs could include not only lost revenue and lost employee productivity, but also damage to your reputation, as well as potential fines. It’s important to assess which data is critical and develop a “tolerability range” for data and application recovery. Consider your RPO and RTO for the different data sets in your organization.

Fortunately, many of the data protection technologies that recently were affordable for only large enterprises are now reasonably priced for smaller companies. Chief among these is disk-based data protection, which greatly reduces backup times and improves recovery performance. As the value of corporate data increases, it’s more important than ever to make sure you have a data protection and recovery plan in place.

Protect your data with Dell solutions

Businesses of all sizes can take advantage of Dell’s cost-effective solutions for protecting data and ensuring timely data recovery. Dell offers an array of enterprise-class data protection products and services, including PowerVault disk and tape backup systems, Dell/EMC networked storage, and leading applications from Symantec, CommVault, and EMC Legato. It’s easy to add a Dell disk array, a tiered storage platform, or a continuous data protection solution.

To help you make sense of the complexity, Dell provides a range of design and deployment services to enable your business to avoid data loss and minimize downtime. With Dell’s support you can create a scalable data infrastructure with the archiving, backup and recovery solution that’s right for your business.