Online backup and recovery services: throwing a lifeline to "stranded servers" - Storage Networking

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2003 by David Ryter

Backup and recovery are part of a group of linked activities that includes data capture, removal, storage and recovery. All of these activities link together to form a backup-and-recovery value chain. Failure along any part of this chain can result in data loss and crippling downtime for a business. Backup and recovery, however, can be tedious and demanding even for companies with sufficient IT staff. For many small and medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprise remote and branch offices (RBOs) that have limited IT support, it is a challenge to backup and recover properly. In many of these businesses, these servers are not backed up by dedicated IT professionals. Such servers have become what we refer to as "stranded servers." The lack of professional management or attention to these stranded servers leads to infrequent or incorrect backup and recovery of critical data.

Trends in Business Today

High growth in SMB and RBO markets: Small and medium businesses represent the largest growing business sector in the United States, where there were 7.4 million small and medium businesses in 1998.

These companies are investing heavily in computer and Internet-related technology. Over 26% have at least one server In 2003, IDC expects these companies to spend $57 billion for technology, and 79% to have Internet access.

Within larger corporations, remote and branch office sites are now the mainstays of many enterprises. Servers in these locations are growing in number. In a previous study, The Gartner Group estimated that 80% of U.S. enterprise sites (about 1.5 million) could be classified as remote or branch offices--i.e., locations with six to 75 employees.

Windows NT/2000 is fueling growth of stranded servers: The growth in SMB and RBO servers has been accompanied by--even fostered by-- a parallel growth in the use of Windows NT/2000 operating systems. Windows NT is now the predominant business-computing platform for networked servers. In the U.S., there are about 10 million servers, and of those, 6 million are Windows NT servers. According to research from the Strategic Resource Group, over 3 million of those Windows NT servers are stranded servers.

The value of the data at risk continues to increase: Data such as customer, financial and communication (email) databases have become, for many organizations, the single most valuable asset and one that is critical to business survival. This is the data at risk on stranded servers. The possible loss of this data is staggering.

Staffing shortages and constraints: According to Gartner Group, although the supply of Windows skills is growing, the demand is growing faster. The supply of data center professionals with Windows skills is even rarer. This problem is magnified for SMBs where the loss of one professional can have a much more significant impact.

The Internet--affordable bandwidth: With the rapid increase in Internet availability and bandwidth, businesses have gone from being able to connect directly only to their own LANs and WANs, to being able to access a universal network that allows them to connect anywhere simply, easily, safely. The maturing of virtual private network (VPNs) and other Internet security technologies now allows businesses to use this larger, public network in a private manner. As a result, businesses can exchange data with customers, with other businesses, and with their own servers in remote locations worldwide over secure connections. Small businesses are rapidly adopting high-speed Internet access. IDC expects the number of small businesses using high-speed access to expand from 380,000 in 1998 to 3.3 million in 2003.

Gartner expects growth in branch office network traffic will increase the need for and use of more broadband capacity in such locations. This need will be addressed by DSL and other broadband connections such as cable, wireless and, in the future, optical technology.

Backup and Recovery Burden

In the present landscape, businesses are running into a number of problems in trying to deal with the backup and recovery of critical data.

Limited IT support leaves data at risk: Typically SMBs may have a few critical applications--accounting, customer information, email--running on one to three servers that they know have to be backed up. With limited IT support, the task of backing up may be assigned to anyone from a principal to support staff personnel, with a less than perfectly well-defined process. Furthermore, backup is not perceived as a strategic, value-added activity. As a result, backup may not get all of the attention it requires. Sometimes this can even lead to backup being neglected or forgotten, leaving critical data at risk for recovery failure. These problems become multiplied in businesses with several sites or locations--such as a restaurant chain or retail outlet where all of the sites require backup coverage. Larger companies with remote and branch offices have similar problems. While these companies may have full complements of IT staff in a central administrative location or data center, there is often no IT staff to mana ge the backup of data at remote or branch offices. Yet, these remote sites are where critical data increasingly resides such as Exchange servers hosting customer correspondence. In many instances, these companies also rely on an informal backup process assigned to a site manager.