Backup and Disaster Recovery
Regardless of the amount of fault-tolerance and
resiliency built into a network and all of its individual
components, there will inevitably come the day when data will have
to be restored from backup. Whether it be recovering from a
catastrophic natural disaster or recovering a critical file,
document or email that was inadvertently deleted a reliable backup
solution and a well-documented, tried and tested recovery plan is an
indispensible consideration in assuring the availability of data and
the continuity of the business.
Today's backup solutions can generally be grouped into one of two
categories, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) or Traditional backup.
Each of these categories has their own strengths, weaknesses,
benefits, drawbacks and limitations and in practice the best
solution is usually a combination of both.
CDP as the name suggests, is characterized by its ability to
continuously backup data in a real-time or near-real-time fashion --
typically to a hard drive or some other high-speed digital media.
These solutions utilize an "agent" running on the computer or server
(i.e. the “source”) being backed up to continuously replicate new or
modified data to a local backup storage device (i.e. the “target”)
The primary benefits of CDP are reliability, a small Recovery Time
Objective (RTO) which is the term used to describe the amount of
time it takes to recover lost data and small Recovery Point
Objectives (RPO) which is the term used to describe the amount of
acceptable data loss in a disaster. They also shine in Bare Metal
Restore functionality, which refers to restoring entire servers from
scratch, both OS and data. Most CDP solutions also offer the
advantage of being able to send the contents from the target to an
offsite location for protection against major disasters that either
destroy or render it useless.
Another advantage of CDP solutions is user “self-service”
functionality which provides end users and easy way to to restore
their own files folders, email messages and so forth thereby
offloading this task from the IT department and further enhancing
the company’s’ efficiency and the IT departments scalability. The
only real drawbacks of a CDP solution is the inherent lack of
long-term storage and archival capabilities however most solutions
allow you to backup the contents of the target storage device to
tape or other such media for this purpose.
Traditional backup is typically implemented the form of a ‘backup
server’ which is usually specialized software running on a general
purpose OS with an accompanying tape drive attached. It too employs
specialized agents to natively backup important data structures such
as the Active Directory, SQL databases, Exchange datastores and
others.
The benefits of traditional backup are that it's a mature technology
and inherently provides long term archival capabilities (tapes are
ideal for long-term data archival). Overall reliability and a larger
RTO/RPO than CDP are generally the drawbacks.
At Fortress IT we have extensive experience with both kinds of
backup and recovery solutions and can recommend and implement
precisely the right solution to meet your business requirements, RTO
and RPO all while staying within your budget.