|
COLLABORATIVE
ENVIRONMENTS
It’s
The Relationship, Not The Data That Counts
By BRUCE L. RUDOLPH
The rapid adoption
of collaborative technologies (e.g., XML, CRM) in today’s intelligent
enterprise applications has created new and unforeseen challenges for
backup, restoration, and recovery strategies. Business has changed enormously
in recent years. Business is going global: corporations set up offices
overseas to meet demands for products and services. Simultaneously,
the Internet provides access to every business from anywhere in the
world. The world economy is moving toward a single global market, placing
demands on information technology (IT) systems around-the-clock. And
not just our clock.
Because the Internet is global and ubiquitous, even planned downtime
at any time can result in lost business. Unplanned downtime during peak
business hours can be disastrous; even more so as the Internet becomes
the primary means for conducting business. The Internet is global and
any time of day is a prime business hour somewhere in the world.
Increased demands on enterprise applications also come from other sources.
Automated manufacturing processes, 24-hour service phone centers, ATM
cash machines, and e-commerce demand service 24 hours a day. No longer
is it possible to shut down a system every night to perform maintenance
on operating systems and databases. Now a system must be available 24x7x365
to service the needs of a corporation’s customers and partners.
Today’s generation of intelligent enterprise applications are responsible
for nearly every transaction that an organization has between its partners,
clients and employees. The rapid adoption of collaborative technologies
and applications such as XML, CRM, and private exchanges creates new,
unforeseen challenges for backup, restoration, and recovery strategies.
Whether the application is a content, customer relationship, or supply
chain management solution, the relationships between information within
these systems (i.e., the metadata) are becoming more valuable –
and mission-critical – than the data itself.
These relationships, when structured together (e.g., a workflow scenario),
create an organization’s e-business processes; responsible for
pushing and pulling content and data out to Web sites, suppliers, vendors,
and customers. The relationships between documents, data files, image
files, and other information, on an enterprise-wide scale, are growing
extremely intricate and complex. Using parent-child relationships, static
links, live links and automatically defined context-sensitive links,
the possibilities for reuse of information in new and creative ways
is endless.
The Importance
Of The Relationships
It is essential to find a means to backup and recover these systems
that have become a fundamental part of the foundation of intelligent
enterprise applications. Integrity must go beyond traditional approaches
(managing metadata via a RDBMS backup routine and documents via a file
server backup utility).
Today’s applications use data stored within an RDBMS and documents
stored within a file system. Some products exist for backing up an RDBMS.
Other products exist to backup files and directories on a file system
(including those marketed as enterprise solutions with hardware and
software). The problem for the customer is which products to buy and
how to integrate them into the existing environment.
Traditional backup solutions are designed to handle the data alone –
a valuable and necessary component of the evolving backup and recovery
strategy, but no longer the whole solution. Restoring data without its
relationships intact is like having data with amnesia.
The data doesn’t know to whom it belongs, where it’s going
and what its relevance is to the business. Data without its relationships
is not very valuable to the enterprise.
A typical backup and disaster recovery solution cannot preserve the
business processes that are used to communicate with partners, employees,
and customers. These processes provide the context for all of the data
gathered.
Without the context and relationships preserved, there is no depth of
understanding of what the significance of the data is and how it should
be used in regards to a particular customer, partner, or employee. It’s
like receiving a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it but
with no further information. “Error! Reference source not found,”
shows a typical object and its relationships with other objects within
a system.
The knowledge contained within the metadata must be preserved by the
backup and recovery solution. “Work in process” at all levels
must be captured and synchronized. No longer is only the data at risk,
but the knowledge captured in the form of links, ownership and process
experiences.
A traditional, “full” backup does not capture this information.
A “full” backup takes a “snapshot” of all the data
in the system at a given time. This involves a complete backup of the
RDBMS database via one product and a mutually exclusive backup of the
file systems that store the content using a different product. A significant
amount of work is involved in determining which products to use, the
procedure to establish the backup and more importantly, how to restore
the data.
Having to use unrelated products to backup metadata and content means
more maintenance demands on the system’s administrator. These solutions
make the task of individual object restoration tedious and time as well
as resource (hardware and employee) consuming. Some of these solutions
require restoring the complete image to another server and then locating
the object.
In fact, the object may not even be in the backup if it was created
before the last snapshot was taken. A backup method that backs up data
and metadata is needed.
This method of operation allows individual objects to be restored; eliminating
the need for a full restore if just an individual object needs to be
restored (e.g., when a file is accidentally deleted).
Backup Need Not
Mean Downtime
Today’s intelligent application environments must be available
around-the-clock. The business continuity process cannot tolerate downtime,
either to build backup files, or restore a system. Recovery must be
provided to any point in time, and done so in a complete and synchronized
manner. A cold backup requires that the application be shut down. A
backup that occurs in read-only mode is only a partial solution. This
type of backup permits users to view data without having to shutdown
either the application or RDBMS, while maintaining a consistent state
between the metadata and content. However, this type of backup falls
short of true 24x7 availability.
What is needed is a backup approach that operates continuously in background,
while users continue to work. This has two benefits.
First, by operating in continuous background mode, recovery can be provided
to any point in time. Recovery is not limited to the time of the last
“scheduled backup.” Work that is performed between traditional
backup periods is not lost if the system fails (subject to the capacity
of the file system for backups and the threshold for data loss).
Second, the execution of the backup process does not infringe on the
business process. Unlike traditional backup approaches and procedures,
the backup continues to provide full read-write access to work objects,
and execution of workflow scripts, during the backup operation. Thus,
continuous backup is provided without negatively impacting critically
important production time.
Conclusion
The goal of 24x7 availability required by today’s business environment
calls for a new approach to backup and recovery of intelligent enterprise
applications. The context and relationships among data must be considered
critical information that must be preserved by the backup process. The
backup process must be as unobtrusive as possible – today’s
global business environment cannot tolerate scheduled downtime as it
once could.
These goals can be approached through a combination of traditional backup
methods and the use of a new generation of off-the-shelf backup and
restore solutions.
Bruce L. Rudolph is chief technology officer and a co-founder of CYA
Technologies Inc. Rudolph has more than 20 years experience developing
software to support large technical and mission-critical applications
for regulated industries and government agencies. His experience comprises
all phases of the product/application development, including requirement
analysis, specification design, implementation, and testing. Rudolph
holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Central Connecticut
State College and Polytechnic University, respectively.
To comment on this
article, go to 1502-11 at www.drj.com/feedback.
|
