Virtual Backup

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Overview

The future of backup sounds like an oxymoron: The future involves forward thinking, and backup involves an archive or history. However, it is critical to consider that sometime in the future, we will need to recover what was done in the past to protect the present. This consideration is as critical as architecting, planning, installing, configuring, and even updating the backup and recovery solution for your enterprise.

So far, everything we have talked about has been based on the current technologies and techniques available to perform backup storage management for the enterprise. Throughout this book, we have made every effort to ensure that our content is not speculative and that the solutions and methods mentioned are real and available solutions today. In this chapter, however, we take a peek into the crystal ball and see how possible changes in technology and business requirements will affect the way you do backup and recovery. While this chapter contains some ideas and methods that are underway, it also contains some speculation and conjecture, in hopes that the visionaries and innovators of this space might take note or at the very least become inspired to develop our thoughts further. Having said that, we make no claims to having a better crystal ball than anyone else as we have tried to gather information from some of these very same visionaries and innovators. We are not saying this is the way it will be-just that these are some of the things that could happen.

The trends in technology are responsible for some of the changes. We are seeing storage capacity doubling every year, resulting in our having more and more data to protect. Network bandwidth is doubling every nine months. Network backups will remain plausible in some environments, but the overall amount of data to be protected will necessitate changes. Networked storage is becoming more common, along with more intelligence being distributed throughout the SAN. These are seen as enablers to some of the new backup technologies. Will we begin to see these hardware solutions and software solutions integrate more closely from the backup perspective?

Still, the greatest visionaries and innovators have not been able to expand the day beyond 24 hours to provide us the ability to back up this ever-growing critical data in light of the most prevalent problem, the need for 24 × 7 backup operations. Backup servers cannot be taken down for maintenance, as they are expected to be running even during the production window. The backup windows are disappearing, or rather, merging with the traditional production window, but at the same time, the recovery requirements are increasing. There is a need for almost instant recovery options. In fact, backup and recovery is now being seen as an integral part of data availability, instead of just data insurance. Everyone wants to make the storage available on demand so that it can be logically moved around the enterprise and be used where it is most needed, but it still must be backed up. When you couple this with the requirement to cluster everything, including the applications, the data, and the data protection services, it makes backup and recovery even more challenging. This is leading to the idea of hot backup systems or even hot backup sites. Will we see more intelligent backup server software? Will backup become an appliance much like we have seen happen with Network File System (NFS) and electronic mail?

As the futurists look at these trends and requirements, one important hardware trend stands out. The cost of disk versus the cost of tape hardware, along with relative performance, is changing very quickly. Tape drives are getting faster and media has more capacity, but the costs of both are going up. Disks are getting cheaper per bit every day, and now we are seeing inexpensive high-density disks with good performance and reliability. This trend makes disk attractive as a backup device or at least suitable for use in the backup formula. The high-speed access makes it very attractive as a recovery device. Will disk be the new backup medium, as we have seen in some cases today? What will happen to tape? Will solid-state solutions prevail? What will the longevity of these solid-state devices mean, if anything, for off-site storage capabilities?

Another area being explored is the potential of merging or integrating different software products to provide an overall data protection strategy. The focus is not just on traditional backup anymore. This integration is already happening with the introduction of some of the frozen image backup products available today. It looks like this trend is going to continue and include several different technologies.

Some of the ideas and thoughts we explore in this chapter then are as follows:

• Virtual backup

• Real-time backup

• Synthetic backups

• Hardware/software integration (embedded agents)

• Intelligent backup server software

• Backup appliances

• Disk, solid-state disk as backup storage

As we found out when researching this chapter, many companies, unless they were ready to release the generally available (GA) version of their products, were reluctant to talk about their futures, and rightly so. Therefore, we have used our own industry experience and customer interactions to develop this chapter. This is our attempt at backup utopia. Even though it may never come to fruition, it's good to dream.

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