D2D2T: is it quite right for you?

Computer Technology Review, May, 2004 by Phil Pascarelli

Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) backup has been touted recently as a "data savior," reducing the time needed to back up distributed systems--which previously required either direct-attached or large tape libraries--in today's time-compressed world. In addition to the speed advantage of caching to disk prior to moving data to tape or other removable media, there are several other inherent benefits that D2D2T delivers.

Unlike tape emulation, which replaces a tape drive with a virtual hard disk equivalent, D2D2T allows users to manage the storage of data closer to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) model. Users can specify the destination and duration of stored data as well as its replication and archive life. In addition, D2D2T offers an excellent data recovery option, allowing instant retrieval of lost or corrupted data. D2D2T is also able to address compliance legislation based storage requirements.

So how do you know if D2D2T is for you? Here are some questions you might ask yourself.

How Long are Your Application Servers Non-Operative While You're Backing Up?

If it is 14 hours or more then you match the average for American companies. According to IDC's Robert Amatruda, the average backup operation shuts down an application service for 14 hours or more. That's 14 hours in which your application servers can be accessed by no one within your organization. Couldn't you benefit from a shorter backup window?

With D2D2T, you can transfer your data to disk at night at a much faster rate than to tape, and then migrate that data to tape, as you need to. This dramatically speeds up the transfer process from the application server to the backup caching hard disk, and greatly reduces the time your application server is offline. With integrated software, you can also schedule your data transfer automatically, eliminating the manual labor involved with data replication and storage, which 32% of companies worried about in a recent InfoStor survey.

How Does Meeting Compliance Regulations Affect Your Data Strategy?

Public and private companies alike are bound to compliance regulations that affect the data strategy. A 2003 Network Computing poll found that 72% of readers polled said they were affected by HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley ACT (GLBA) or the Patriot Act. Some of these affect only public companies, but the HIPAA regulation, especially its strict requirement to keep personnel files confidential, affects every company. In fact, fines for ignoring specific requirements under HIPAA can reach $25,000 per violation. Scarier still is the Sarbanes-Oxley fine a corporate officer who knowingly signs a false financial report faces: up to $1 million and as many as 10 years in prison.

The ILM capabilities of D2D2T give you the ability to manage your data to specific time requirements. Look for a solution that integrates data traffic and storage management software. Your D2D2T solution should also include policy-based replication, which allows you to initiate multi-storage replication, migration and file grooming automatically. These ILM capabilities give you the ability to automatically manage to your regulatory compliance initiatives, moving individual files to offsite storage when they are less critical and deleting them when you are no longer required to keep them. Sophisticated, yet simple to use ILM capabilities built into your D2D2T can ensure you are managing your regulated data correctly and save your company (and you) potentially millions of dollars in fines.

How Much Data Do You Backup Daily?

A 2003 Imation study estimated that 66% of small to medium sized enterprises and businesses back up their data daily. That percentage grows for larger companies with higher volumes of data: 86% of companies back up 10-100 gigabytes or more of data every day.

And if you are like most companies, data your regularly back up is growing at an alarming rate: an increase of ten times is predicted over the next five years. As your data grows, your backup window shrinks, forcing you to backup more data in the same window.

While backups have gotten faster, the data growth has stripped the speed benefits. The result is that backups simply take longer. Couple this with a "risk window," or the amount of time your application server is at risk of being unavailable, and your ability to back up data efficiently has never been more critical.

A staged D2D2T system gives you the ability to manage the time data is transferred directly to disk, rather than to tape. Because this transfer usually occurs at the maximum Network or SAN speed, it is often 4-5 times faster than when you backup data directly to a tape library. This makes your application server accessible sooner as well as decreases your multiple tape drive requirement down to a single autoloader, saving hardware and software costs. In addition, today's latest tape drives require data feeds at a constant rate to maximize their high transfer rates. Unfortunately, pulling data to a tape library over the network doesn't achieve this, particularly with small files. D2D2T solves this problem by supplying the tape drive with the data rate needed to keep it on stream.