The gathering cloud

In today’s business environment, IT administrators must be able to ensure their companies are resilient to a multitude of threats and sources of downtime. Business continuity requires establishing contingency plans for system hardware failures, man-made and natural disasters and security threats that use a variety of data and infrastructure protection solutions from basic backup and recovery to archiving to disaster recovery services.

For enterprises following established best practices, this generally means following the “rule of three,” also known as the “3:2:1 rule.” The rule of three states that a company should have at least three copies of its data on two different types of media, with at least one copy being stored off-site.
 

The encroaching cloud

Using rotational media, such as tapes or low-cost SATA (Serial ATA) drives, and storing them with a media vaulting provider is how many companies have decided to meet this best practice of off-site backup with different media. Media vaulting also has been a preferred method for saving archives.

Archiving is different than backup. Archives are long-term repositories of inactive or little accessed data retained for future use, such as for compliance purposes or as historical snapshots.

Tape, in particular, has for years been a cost-effective, portable media for long-term vaulting. However, for a technology that has been in consistent use in IT for more than 60 years, tape is a much maligned media. Critics of tape say it is fragile, has high failure rates, suffers poor backward compatibility and may require manual handling by non-IT personnel in many instances, such as remote offices. Therefore, industry pundits have predicted repeatedly over time that various new technologies will replace tape.

However, tape has continued to live on. It has been augmented by new types of rotational media, such as SATA drives, where greater search speed or deduplication benefits were needed. However, tape has remained the king of inexpensive, portable, long-term data archiving.

Cloud-based technologies, nonetheless, are having a profound impact on IT professionals and are transforming almost every aspect of how IT departments operate and deploy resources. Cloud storage is simply the most significant change to the IT industry that we’ve seen in the past 25 years. Through automated, dynamic configuration and release of resources, cloud allows IT professionals to accelerate innovation and get more projects done with the same amount of resources.

Cloud storage seems to be a perfect fit for backup, recovery and archiving. Therefore, it is natural to ask: “How is cloud going to affect the outlook for media vaulting going into the future?”

If cloud storage is changing everything from how applications are written to how IT operates daily, it certainly will have an impact on data protection and archiving.

Is cloud storage going to be the final nail in the coffin of tape? Are enterprises finally going to be able to ditch tape altogether? Does vaulting of physical media to a secure location become old fashioned?
 

Peos and cons

To answer these questions, we need to look at the pros and cons of cloud-based archival storage versus traditional archival storage using rotational media, such as tape.

Cloud-based backup and archival storage offers the benefit of automating the process of creating a second copy of data that is stored off-site. For backup, this means IT professionals are able to get their production data off-site easily. This saves IT professionals from the need to buy and refresh tapes and disks, which can be a labor-intensive process. Cloud storage also helps IT professionals avoid the backward compatibility challenge of dealing with multiple generations of tape systems. Using the cloud, IT professionals get to choose from a wide variety of vendors that provide abundant and dynamic on-demand expandable storage. Cloud storage also provides the ability to use this off-site copy of an organization’s data for disaster recovery of critical workloads by rapidly spinning up on-demand virtual machines in the cloud using this data. As a result, RTOs (recovery time objectives) can be drastically reduced for critical information even in the event of a major disaster that prevents a company from operating out of its main data center.

The primary disadvantage of cloud-based recovery and archival storage is its dependency on WAN (wide area network) bandwidth. An enterprise needs sufficient bandwidth to be able to move all data that must be backed up and archived off-site in the cloud. If an operation only has a small amount of data to protect, then it probably has no problem moving strictly to cloud and ditching tape altogether.

However, for operations with large amounts of data or with a WAN pipe constricted by budget or availability in light of location, moving solely to cloud may be impossible. For most enterprises with a significant amount of data, it is not practical to archive all the information they require without using some form of near-line archiving media, such as tape.

To get around this bandwidth challenge, many cloud-based backup solutions provide the ability to seed the initial set of data into the cloud by shipping tapes or disks to the cloud provider. Therefore, from that point on, only smaller incremental backups need to be done over the WAN.

Many enterprises also have compliance requirements for archiving complete sets of data that are snapshots in time. Many may have to meet regulations and retain up to seven years or more of archives. Unfortunately, even with the fastest Internet connections available, for enterprises that have terabytes of data, it’s still much faster to create a set of tapes and overnight them to an off-site media vaulting facility. For example, if we were to try to do this solely over a WAN connection to a cloud, archiving multiple terabytes of data could take days or even weeks.

A separate set of isolated, point-in-time archives of production systems also provides a contingency for other types of disasters. For instance, ransomware is a type of malware that restricts access to an infected system and demands a ransom to remove these restrictions. A simple solution to ransomware is to use an archive to reset the system to a point before the infection took place. This only works if archives are regularly created and isolated from the source, however.
 

The power of two

Will cloud have an impact on the outlook for media vaulting?

The reality is that media vaulting and the use of tape can be expected to continue for many years to come. For small businesses with small amounts of data, a cloud-only solution is perfect; it allows these companies to quickly get their data off-site and to set up disaster recovery services. These are two things that many small businesses don’t do at all today.

However, for midsize and large enterprises that rely on media vaulting today, the outlook remains much the same as it has for years. Cloud can and should be used as a way to provide an additional level of protection and new options for disaster recovery, including disaster recovery as a service. However, media vaulting using tape will remain the most cost-effective means of storing large amounts of data in multiple sets off-site for compliance and other forms of disaster recovery.

Each option has benefits and trade-offs. Each is able to provide protection for different contingencies. Both provide the ability to get important data off-site, and both provide a means to do disaster recovery to meet recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) goals.

Enterprises should look at cloud-based backup and archiving as a means to augment and improve their disaster recovery resiliency in combination with off-site media vaulting. Used together, they provide maximum protection for a variety of disaster and compliance scenarios.

Dave LeClair is the vice president of product marketing at Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level cloud recovery.