Enhanced Backup Options Exist

The key thing to keep in mind when developing a data protection strategy is that the range of options is broader than current debates over tape backup and disk mirroring might lead you to believe. In fact, new technologies are appearing (literally) almost daily that enable data protection to be tailored to specific application requirements.

Many new products are "bolt-ons" to existing tape or disk schemes. Others are self-described "disruptive technologies," which claim to replace tradition backup and mirroring approaches to data protection altogether. Careful analysis and due diligence testing is the order of the day to separate the kernels of truth from the chaff.

In 2002, an industry organization called the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative (EBSI) was formed to help do just that. Founders ”Quantum Corporation, Network Appliance, Legato Systems, and Avamar Technologies ”created EBSI with the expressed goal of exploring the options between backup and mirroring and establishing reference standards for deploying these solutions. (This author also sat on the Board of Directors as a "consumer ombudsman.")

The meetings of the group were amazingly cooperative and convivial. Each company was clearly pursuing its own backup or mirroring "hybrid" strategies in an effort to address customer-perceived deficits in its own technology and seeking to capitalize on new architectures enabled by low-cost disk arrays and new intellectual property. Still there was general agreement that there were "many roads to Rome" and that it was in the best interests of vendors collectively to assist their customers in protecting their data assets.

As testimony to the perceived importance of data protection, EBSI generated a groundswell of interest in the IT community. The organization's website attracted over 450 end- user registrations within days of going online, and most registrations were from consumers who were concerned about the efficacy of their current data protection strategy or seeking to define their first strategy in the wake of disasters such as the September 11th terrorist attacks or new regulatory and legal mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley, and the Graham Leach Bliley Act. ^[5]

In my role as "consumer ombudsman" on the board of directors for EBSI, I found myself inventorying the technologies that were coming to market to "fix" backup without necessarily incurring the expense of "mirroring." Figure 9-11 captures the spectrum of solutions that emerged from this inventory.

Figure 9-11. The ever-widening spectrum of data protection solutions.

From the diagram, you can readily see that some enhanced backup technologies are software-based, some are hardware-based, and others consist simply of topologies or secondary uses of other components . Many were "tin-wrapped software," an expression sometimes used around Silicon Valley to describe new software that has been wedded to a commodity server platform often running a Linux kernel to create a basic appliance. Such appliances are useful as a means for demonstrating the capabilities of software, though they may not necessarily be the vendor's platform or deployment strategy of choice.

In 2002, there were a lot of tin-wrapped software appliances floating around. Like B-movies of the 1950s, most were junk, a few were bound to be classics, but all sought to compete for the consumer's mental and network bandwidth.