Disaster Recovery Journal

IT organizations can drive up the cost of storage unnecessarily by treating all data the same and storing it all on the same media. Let’s face the fact: my resume is not as important as the payroll database or even the email database. So, why are you using the same storage policy for both?

Stop using one policy to rule all of your data. It might be simple, but it is killing your bottom line. When looking for a data protection solution, find one that allows you to use policies to treat data differently.

When keeping pace with growing data, a major concern for IT organizations, in terms of both storage and data protection is how the data protection solution will handle the growth.

If your business has grown its capacity by 40-60 percent in each of the past three years, and it now supports billions of data objects, you need a solution that grows with you. This growing of capacity may be outpacing your data protection solution and you may need to find a way to scale your protection.

Do you have different products to protect different types of data or different systems? If so, you need to start thinking about standardizing on a single product.  Think of all the time, training and resources you would save.

Can two of the same things have two different prices? Heck yes! Not only can they have different prices, but they can also be dramatically different. 

In the last few years, data protection solution providers have started to offer something besides “core-” or “server-” based. When buying software you need to consider all the options. One of the new options is capacity. 

By Rob Giffin, Avalution Consulting
Originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

Have you ever recommended additional redundancy for a process, department, or facility, only to be told that your organization couldn't afford it or have the project repeatedly delayed until next year? I have. It’s pretty common in our profession. 

Andy Osborne's blog from last week was truly timely: I've just been assigned a new task by my boss: Take a recovery management plan done for one company site, and sinter it down into a suitable "template" for other "small" company sites.  The task has already shown indications of Andy's experience: the work done by predecessors causing more work.  It's not that wrong things were written, but the document doesn't "flow" like a plan should.  I beieve a "plan" is like a recipe, only longer and without the rewarding aroma to savor at the end.  ;-)

Of the many kinds of plans I've seen over my years in this profession, few really read like a recipe, rather more like a cross between a dictionary with a mixture of random essays.  No flow.  But this time, I feel much better about the prospects, because the plan I'm to use as the starting point has, on one of the early pages after the Table of Contents, a FLOW CHART!!!  It has been my contention since my earliest months in this business, that recovery is a process, meaning it must flow - start at Square One and start marching until you're done.

Perhaps, if you've found yourslef feeling like your plan lacks something, maybe it needs some improvement in its flow.  Developing recovery plans can't (easily) effect a timely recovery without flow, because no matter how many people you throw at the disruption, the lack of flow will have them bumping into one another.

The emergence of the data center began in the 1990s, when companies began installing servers on their premises, replacing clunky and outdated mainframes. As technology improved, these spaces moved to off-site facilities with more dedicated resources. Today’s data centers are impressively sized, with countless premium features. In fact, the world’s largest data center—located in Las Vegas, Nevada—covers over nine acres of data real estate!

A traditional data center is an industrial building in which space is provided for server infrastructure, along with power resources, cooling systems, cabling, natural disaster suppression technology, and the most up to date security measures. To maintain cost efficiency, data centers are normally built where overhead costs such as electricity and real estate are low, but still have the ability to maintain an adequate staff. It is important to note that traditional data centers can be expensive to build in terms of monetary value and time; this cost is likely handed down to the customers down the road.

It is not all about data deduplication! Many data protection products and providers talk about data deduplication as if it will save the world. In fact, data deduplication is only a small part of the solution. What we need to be talking about is across the board data reduction.

Data reduction technologies are the first line of defense against rapidly expanding data volumes and costs. STORServer provides built-in data reduction technologies, such as progressive-incremental backup, data deduplication and data compression, enabling organizations to reduce backup storage capacity by as much as 95 percent.  STORServer also provides advanced tape management and efficient tape utilization capabilities, which can further reduce data storage capacity requirements.

You may have been researching the process of incorporating a cloud hosting solution into your business practice, or you may just be curious about this relatively new phenomenon. Either way, you will soon see that there is nothing but love for the cloud.

Traditionally, running a server required paying monthly subscription fees for chunky, lagging systems that you could either maintain on your own premises or pay even more for it to be occasionally maintained by a data center staff member. No more! The new technology of the cloud allows customers to pay for what they need, and only what they need.

Before considering cloud-based data protection, it is important to first understand the basics of cloud, which can sometimes be foggy (at best). With trade magazines and publications defining the "cloud" in a number of different ways, IT managers and executives are often confused about the true meaning of the term; however the recent maturation of cloud-based services has helped the definition become more focused.

 In a nutshell, there are two main types of cloud-based data protection services: public and private. The public cloud is where data is on a shared infrastructure. In a private cloud, data is on dedicated infrastructure and the owners of that data share no part of it with others. There are variations of the public and private cloud, including combinations of the two that result in a "semi-private cloud," but for the sake of clarity, we will stay away from that topic.