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News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2006
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 31 July 2006
Why Recovery Lifecycle Management makes
sense
The Taneja Group recently predicted that 2006 and 2007 will be all about businesses trying to assemble reliable recovery infrastructures that make their disk backup investments worthwhile
Storage analyst The Taneja Group recently predicted that 2006 and 2007 will be all about businesses trying "to assemble reliable recovery infrastructures that make their disk backup investments worthwhile", and that it also envisions "recovery tiers [taking up] residence alongside storage tiers in the industry vernacular" This is because, in line with the increasing complexity of storage infrastructures, there is a parallel need for increasing recovery flexibility
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Data protection requirements have moved on from the purely technical question of "Did the backup work?" to the much more complex question of "Is my business protected?"
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Storage managers are waking up to the realisation that they need to dedicate a large amount of storage to email.
In practical terms, it's imperative to be able to uncover the exact data an organisation needs at precisely the right moment, in spite of the numerous variables that abound (geography, applications, storage platforms, age of data, etc).
This is the crux of the discipline The Taneja Group has called Recovery Lifecycle Management (RLM).
A natural extension of the information lifecycle management (ILM) paradigm, RLM focuses on aligning the most appropriate data protection technologies with the most appropriate data sets.
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It involves establishing tiered recovery environments so that businesses can optimise their recovery schemas across applications, geographical locations, and storage platforms.
In the same way that tiered storage environments assign storage targets by data value, tiered recovery schemas intuitively manage recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) based on application and data priority.
For example, your organisation may be running Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, VMware, Cisco, and file servers concurrently; restoring any one of these entire systems is vastly different from restoring one specific message in Exchange.
The data protection market is shifting towards this sophisticated recovery strategy, with data protection suites and portfolios emerging that make RLM a reality in any business and storage configuration.
These may be characterised by the following, increasingly familiar technologies:.
* Disaster Recovery (DR) - good DR solutions typically replicate mission-critical information between heterogeneous devices across any distance, either between data centres or between remote offices and data centres via database-aware, transaction-based remote replication or asynchronous and synchronous mirroring.
They facilitate business continuity at the remote site for rapid time-to-business, and automated failback to the primary site once it is back up and running.
* VirtualTape Library (VTL) - VTLs have been widely embraced by today's enterprises and OEMs alike, and with good reason: this cost-effective and easily deployed solution exploits the power of disk to emulate leading tape libraries.
This enhances the reliability, speed, and recoverability of existing backup environments while consolidating backup management.
Advanced encryption should be employed to secure data during offsite IP-based replication of virtual tapes for disaster protection, and when exporting to physical tapes for archiving.
* Continuous Data Protection (CDP) - CDP is the newest addition.
A good CDP solution provides true, block-level, any-point-in-time (aPIT) recovery for all environments - database, messaging, and file services - with data integrity.
Within the ILM framework it provides the highest tier of data protection by providing ongoing protection across heterogeneous storage resources, OS platforms, data types, and locations.
CDP allows incoming information to be continuously replicated and written to journals to provide the widest range of known-good points in time for data rollback.
The resulting replica contains application, database, and email data in a stable state, allowing you to quickly recover business critical data as needed.
CDP solutions can also include immediate remote boot recovery of the system ("bare metal recovery") through an iSCSI or Fibre Channel HBA, PXE, as well as recovery CD.
Together, these powerful tools span the disk-to-disk (D2D) and disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenarios under the RLM umbrella and form a unified paradigm for data protection.
The goal is delivery of both the fastest and the most reliable data recovery throughout the data lifecycle with minimal business downtime.
Many D2D platforms have been purchased over the last three years, for the most part with the aim of guaranteeing the backup and restore process.
Return on investment has been a decidedly secondary consideration - certainly secondary to ensuring business continuity.
However, now those disk platforms are operational and the obvious benefits are being enjoyed as 'normal', IT departments are looking for evidence of a return on their investment in these platforms, much as they would for any other major IT purchase.
Recovery Lifecycle Management provides not only a framework for optimising recovery schemas but also that return on investment, and that is why RLM makes sense for businesses.
Falconstor is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006 the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage.
Now in its 6th year, the show features a comprehensive free education programme and over 90 exhibitors in the National Hall, Olympia, London from 18 - 19 October 2006.
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