News and Events : PVBS Newsletter October 2007

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By Tim Brennan, SysArc

More and more these days, it is becoming clear to us that tape backup is no longer the best solution for storing critical information. The news is replete with stories about stolen laptop with thousands of sensitive customer records compromised or tape backups with critical financial data being lost or damaged in a flood. Government contractors should be considering how they are securing their financial data in light of Sarbanes-Oxley and DCAA regulations and an online backup solution might be the saving grace in a catastrophe.

With recent advances in technology, online backup solutions have become the alternative to the common tape backup systems that are full of risks that most organizations are not aware of. The facts show that a large percentage of tape backup jobs are error prone. Many companies do not test the restore function of their backups on a regular basis. If they did, they would likely find that their disaster recovery capabilities are severely compromised. In general, tape is an inferior media for backing up data, as it requires significant manual intervention and needs to be physically transported offsite, which often times means the IT person takes it home.

Forward thinking organizations are looking elsewhere. Increasingly, organizations are looking at Online Backup Services from third-party providers. In much the same way that Storage Area Networks (SAN) are replacing file servers, online backup is making tape backup obsolete because the cost of disk storage and bandwidth has been dropping significantly while transmission speeds and security and recovery features have been increasing dramatically. The beauty of online storage is the flexibility to automatically backup your data securely to an offsite Data Center and have immediate access to files that need to be recovered down to a single email. With tape backup, you might have to wait hours or days to find and recover a single email, but not with online backup.

Here’s how it works. You setup the solution to automatically backup your servers and desktops to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device on certain time intervals (every 15 minutes for email and transactional databases, once a day for other data). The NAS device is comparable to a server with a disk array that can hold all of your backup files and acts as a traffic cop to encrypt and transmit the data over the internet to the offsite data center. At this point, you have two backups - one on the NAS device and one at the offsite Data Center. Most services also send a copy of your backup to a redundant facility in case something catastrophic happens to one of their Data Centers.

The cost of using an online service provider is very reasonable although there are some significant differences from vendor to vendor. In general, the prices should be in the $5-$10 per compressed Gigabyte (GB), per month range. Some vendors charge for uncompressed versus compressed data and that can mean big swings in the price as most data can be compressed from 30-50%. There is some confusion in the marketplace around this issue and you need to ask the vendor before signing up.

For more information, please contact Tim Brennan, SysArc managing partner, at tbrennan@sysarc.com.