Ensuring data protection on the path to Linux

Computer Technology Review, Spring, 2007 by Ken Horner

Open source technologies are gaining momentum as a viable backbone for core computing requirements, resulting in soaring popularity for Linux worldwide. In fact, 2006 was a banner year for Linux, powered by a record surge in enterprise deployments as well as broad-based validations from industry heavyweights, including Oracle and Microsoft.

As the fastest growing operating system and storage management software opportunity in the market today, Linux continues to gain substantial traction in companies of all types and sizes, from mid-range organizations to large-scale enterprises running mission-critical applications.

Perhaps the most valuable validation that Linux is ready for primetime in enterprise and data center environments is its ever-increasing application support. Beyond its distinguished trademark as a staple for use in web portals and web hosting as part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), Linux is winning broader acceptance as a platform for mission-critical databases, messaging, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and payroll. In response, enterprise software vendors are increasingly porting applications to Linux, resulting in wide-scale deployments across all industries, including finance, retail, government, manufacturing and education.

The ability to install more affordable hardware and take advantage of many more software choices results in higher-performance, lower-cost technology deployments. To that end, the long-term value proposition for migrating to Linux is a compelling incentive. Reducing costs has been a dominant driver for Linux adoption, especially at the expense of UNIX, because the tab for software and porting is low to non-existent.

The business case for Linux migrations, especially from a UNIX environment, is fairly straightforward and takes the following into consideration:

* Reduced capital expenditures

* Lowered administrative costs

* Decreased operating system license fees

* Minimal training requirements

* Greater flexibility and control in leveraging off-the-shelf and custom applications

Often, Linux gets its start supporting a specific application or workgroup and over time permeates the organization in growing numbers to take on larger and more critical roles in supporting corporate computing workloads. In addition to commingling with Windows, Linux also must coexist with legacy UNIX, as well as Apple Macintosh platforms in increasingly heterogeneous environments. While the business case to support Linux migration is a solid one, companies may find themselves on shaky ground when facing the realities of supporting a mix of different computing platforms.

The vital role Linux now plays in the enterprise has sparked a new debate about how to incorporate it into an overall strategy that safeguards all data, regardless of the platform and application within which it resides. The conundrum only becomes more complex when taking into account all the different Linux distributions gaining traction worldwide, including AsianUX, Debian, FreeBSD, Mandriva, Miracle, Red Hat, SGI, Novell SUSE SLES, Turbolinux, etc.

While the consensus seems to favor relying on a single cross-platform solution to manage and protect heterogeneous data, the reality is many organizations have yet- or do not know how-to accomplish this feat. To make matters more complicated, many of the larger data protection vendors have been slow to support Linux, forcing end-users to run Linux hardware as clients to a Windows backup server. This type of band-aid fix typically is only sufficient until the Linux system expands to support larger, more data-intensive applications and databases. Ultimately, this approach proves inadequate and makes it difficult to meet ever-increasing backup windows.

In order to make separate solutions work together, time-constrained IT staffers are forced to write additional and/or manual scripts to conduct Linux backup and recovery procedures for applications that are not being protected properly by older data protection solutions. While the result provides a certain level of data protection, it also creates an isolated "island," which requires its own administration and management nightmares and still has data loss exposure in real-time production environments.

The proliferation of separate solutions for different platforms ultimately is insufficient and costly. In addition, this practice cannot provide one unified picture that integrates status, functionality, administration and reporting of the separate platforms. Enterprises need centralized, integrated, OS-agnostic data protection to effectively safeguard mixed-platform environments.

Multi-platform backup and recovery is the first line of defense in ensuring the well-being of Linux environments. To that end, it's imperative to seek a platform-independent solution that works as well in backing up Linux, Solaris and Macintosh environments as it does with Windows. Once the backup and recovery bases are covered, it makes sense to seek advanced capabilities for heightened data protection. In this quest, savvy IT departments are evaluating a growing suite of solutions that go well beyond backup and recovery, including: