Thursday, August 5, 2010

Off-Site Backup - The Bandwidth Hog

In IT best practices, it's advised to store data backups off-site. The simple logic is this: in the event of total destruction of one location, such as a fire or flood, the data is stored separately and is therefore recoverable. Sounds like a simple principal, right? But getting that data to another site has always presented a bit of a challenge.

Six years ago, while still working for a software VAR in Indianapolis, we accomplished this on a nightly schedule, and each Friday shipped tape back-ups via Fed-Ex to our corporate office in Detroit. This presented two problems. First, the backup window in the event of a minor system failure was a full day. But second, our backup window in the event of total loss was up to 1 week. That's a high risk of data loss.

How has broadband changed the back-up game?

Today, we maintain off-site backups without ever shipping a tape. With broadband availability reaching more and more businesses, off-site backup can be accomplished over the network. Even for small offices, tools like Mozy.com offer off-site backup at an affordable price. A nightly process no longer writes data to a tape, ready for storage in the morning. Today, nightly processes send many hundreds of gigabytes and even terabytes of data over the air, cables, and fibers to be safely archived at a separate location.

But can broadband keep up?

As with many things, technology is still fighting to keep up with demands. As companies began to adopt the broadband-enabled backup model, a new potential began to appear. If no hardware is required, why not backup more often? Why not twice a day? Why not hourly? Why not continuously?

Continuous Data Protection, or CDP, arose as IT professionals realized there was no longer a need to backup data in frozen points-in-time, but rather continuously as changes are made. Real-time edits are saved off-site as well as locally, creating a continuous stream of data flowing out of any connected office. But, can broadband keep up with this demand?

But this capability doesn't come without a cost. In a true CDP environment, whenever large files are saved -- images, audio, video, CAD or 3D models -- the data is transmitted over the same broadband connection that feeds users' email and internet, not to mention back-end business-critical processes. Moreover, these transmissions rely on the scarcer of the two channels, the upstream channel. The result for many companies is an erratic broadband performance, and even server slow-down.

So, how can you avoid crippling your daily productivity with CDP? Consider a few tips:

Consider whether CDP really is a necessity. For many companies, 4-hour or 2-hour backup windows are perfectly acceptable risk levels, and the bandwidth crunch is dramatically reduced.
Implement a CDP, or any backup solution, that allows throttling -- an automated process that diminishes file transfer while other network usage is high, prioritizing business-critical functions over that of data backup.
If multiple machines are being backed up, stagger their schedules so that they don't each begin their file transfers simultaneously.

Labels: backup, Bandwidth, Broadband, CDP, Upstream