Backup and recovery is not dead - Storage Management

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2003 by Phil Pascarelli

One of the myths in the IT world is that most methods of backing up data are ineffective. Thomas Pynchon's 1961 novel "V" popularized the phantasmagorical notion of giant blind albino man-eating alligators roaming the sewer tunnels under the streets of the Big Apple. Likewise, the IT press has popularized a no-less sensational notion: that the vast majority of data recovery attempts fail. A recovery failure ratio of 70% is a recurring statistic apocryphally attributed to "analyst research." This means that no fewer than two out of three attempts to recover data from backup end in failure. Other statistics demonstrate that business managers and those whom they charge with protecting their business data uniformly lack confidence in the usefulness of their data protection practices.

The Pot and the Kettle

Faced with this--"ahem"--unpleasant perception dominating the customer base, storage hardware manufacturers and storage software vendors have allowed their marketing dialectic to turn into a finger-pointing exercise, which would be amusing if it were not so tragically ridiculous. Over the years, we've become familiar with the point-counterpoint of "It's the software!" coming from the hardware bench, with "It's the tape drive!" answering from the disk vendor's bench, punctuated now and then by "It's the user's fault!" coming from all vendors in unison. Fratricidal mud is slung daily between marketing mavens of rival companies. But does it really serve any useful purpose to portray a competing product as unreliable? Given the overcrowded state of the storage market, most competing products are indistinguishable to the customer's naked eye, and the perception of unreliability spreads beyond its intended target to stain the entire market space, including the accuser. The down-home country term for the kind of marketing messaging dominating the storage industry today is "spitting in the wind."

D2D: Proceed at Your Own Risk

Emerging from the rubble is a new paradigm which shifts the backup and recovery limelight to disk storage. In the late '90s, EMC Corporation's Mike Ruettgers was known to say to anyone willing to report the story, "Tape is dead!" Yet tape is still alive and well, in spite of his pronouncements. Even EMC has changed its tune to, "There could be a place for tape." Just recently, a senior executive in a market-leading tape storage company finally responds to Ruettgers' claims with, "I would argue that disk is dead." But the fact is that disk itself is not the biggest threat to tape's viability.

The real threat comes from bandwidth. The fat lady will sing for tape and other removable storage media when, and only when, it becomes economical and feasible for everyone and anyone to spirit data off site via wide pipes. Until then, relying on inexpensive consumer-class disks located on site as a substitute for proper disaster recovery planning is more aptly described as planning for a disaster. A predominant portion of the landmass of the U.S. is subject to significant natural hazards: damaging earthquakes are known to strike even in the Midwest, fires periodically scorch the West, floods and tornadoes repeatedly threaten the Heartland, and seductively-named hurricanes wreak seasonal havoc on the east and southeast coastlines. For these reasons, real estate lenders commonly require proof of specialized insurance from their borrowers. But, to date, business lenders do not yet require proof of insurance or protection for their customers' data assets, which are even more irreplaceable and valuable than buildings and parking lots. But just leave it to Uncle Sam to step in where the private sector's voluntary measures fall short. Big Brother's new legal morass of Acts and Regulations governing data retention and handling virtually guarantees that there is no reasonable or achievable path to compliance for the average small to mid-sized business, particularly not if D2D is its sole method of backup.

Disk Staging Takes Center Stage in SMB

Despite the risks, D2D backup has swept through the SMB space like wildfire. Like the television watchers in the seventies film "Network," SMB tape users have flung open their windows and stuck their heads out to yell: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Like Linux sweeping through the Unix space, D2D has gained ground as a grass roots movement because ultimately it makes sense to users. With the cost of disk storage dropping and dropping, it is difficult for anyone to argue against, at the very least, using disk as a staging step preliminary to migration to tape storage or other removable storage. Count the benefits: ease and rapidity of recovery, inexpensive high throughputs, multiple data streams, improved utilization of expensive removable storage resources, and the list goes on. And, by eventually migrating to tape, the user gets the benefit of secure off-site archiving, plus low-cost durable media for long-term retention of data. It's no wonder that Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) is one of the storage industry's hottest buzzwords. Vendors of every ilk are doing all they can to encourage this propitious feeding frenzy. But who should take the credit for bringing D2D2T to the masses? Several vendors are vying for the after-the-fact distinction of being first in this new category. One vendor even went so far as to file a trademark registration application for the term D2D2T as recently as July 2003--months, if not years, after the term had already been in common usage. The truth is that the credit for D2D2T should go to the prescient users who envisioned a new and sensible way of doing things long before the legion of greedy vendors saw the potential of a lucrative bandwagon and jumped on.