As data recovery and backup continues to be one of the most talked about issues
in an otherwise solid data management and protection plan. More and more
companies are now moving forward to actively address data recovery problems
stemming from areas like growing data loads, nonexistent backup windows, too
much network traffic or poor performance, inefficient storage hardware, media
management problems and poor backup reporting.
When looked closely all these problems are generated from one common source - A
lack of in-depth understanding of the storage environment and enterprises the
world over are focusing hard towards putting in place a solid data recovery
policy in order to smoothen their information needs.
A lot of enterprises put data in small and medium-sized files - and a lot of
them. The complicated nature of data recovery and management makes backups a
crucial issue in IT. Enterprises in general need to be assured that their
backups are successful and that they're backing up what really needs to be
backed up.
Data recovery involves disparate data systems
Interestingly enough, data types may vary dramatically - such as e-mail,
databases, multimedia and graphics - data may serve one or multiple
inter-related applications within an enterprise environment.
Some decisions about backup and data recovery may or may not be flexible and
purely depend on the size and nature of an organization. Federal, state and
local governments have already imposed requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley to
ensure that enterprises are conducting business properly. Here enterprises need
to perform a thorough assessment of the storage environment and the data itself
that correctly identifies the problems in order to better manage different
backup needs and requirements.
Accessing data recovery needs
This assessment can be performed by asking simple questions like – does the
organization have a small number of large files to back up, or a large number of
small files? What sort of time frame is being take to perform data recovery and
backups? Are backups taking too long because static or obsolete data is being
backed up too often? Is the organization backing up old or outdated data files
repeatedly.
After performing this simple evaluation – an organization is more likely to have
thoroughly evaluated the data when compared to the available storage resources. This in turn will lead an organization to find more open-ended options than
reactively purchasing hard disks or ever-larger tape libraries to solve a data
management problem.
It requires utmost visibility into the backup and storage environment in order
to make an intelligent decision on data protection. The first step towards this
visibility is finding out why the data exists in the first place, who owns it,
where it resides, when it was last accessed, what level of archiving versus
availability the business application requires, and then determining whether
current technologies can meet these needs.
Once an organization completes evaluation of data recovery and storage
environment. It's time to move towards the next step, which is to consider the
requirements for protecting data and to determine if these requirements can be
reduced.
Grooming data your way to data recovery
Grooming data properly before backing it all up is likely to reduce the overall
backup load for an organization. In case of enterprises where tapes are
regularly taken off site for archiving purposes - data may be stored first to a
disk system in a hierarchical storage management environment.
It is interesting to note that disk storage allows fast and easy recovery for
frequently accessed files in the case of accidental data loss. Manual tape
retrieval is suggested for most operations where data is not as frequently
accessed. Eventually, data can be removed from onsite disk storage and archived
on tape with little sacrifice in efficiency and a realistic timeframe for
recovery.
Home| data backup | disaster recovery | backup software | backup | onstream | flash backup drives | contact us