|
Breakthrough Data
Recovery for IBM AIX
Environments
How New Technologies Are
Making Data Protection,
Recovery and High Availability
Easier and More Affordable
W H I T E P A P E R
Introduction
Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From
IT departments to the Board Room, managers have seen the importance of
business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and
profitability. This white paper will provide a road map to the most effective
strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should
data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
Planning for recovery-designing and implementing a solution to reduce the
amount of recovery time needed after an interruption-is a pressing
requirement for businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan
that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered quickly, IT
managers are generally confronted with several challenges:
. How can I ensure my applications and data are recoverable withoutimpacting business operations?
. Do I have data protection strategies available to me that meet my recoverypoint and recovery time objectives?
. Can I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local andremote (disaster) recovery requirements?
. Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?
Bottom Line: Businesses face a variety of risks to their data such as
accidentally deleted files, data corruption from viruses or hacker attacks,
software/hardware failures, power outages or any of a wide range of natural
disasters. Business and IT managers need a data protection and recovery
strategy that keeps the organization's business doing business. For AIX IT
departments, this is a high priority.
1 v i s i o n s o l u t i o n s . c o m
W H I T E P A P E R
Tape Backups: First Line of Defense
If you're like most businesses, you're using some form of data protection today-probablytape-based backup. Periodically, someone shuts applications down to perform a backupto tape. Depending on the volume of data that is being copied, this may take several hoursand requires manual intervention to set up the backup job, run it, confirm that it occurred,and then return the application to operation.
The backup copy may be kept locally in case data needs to be recovered in the near term,and eventually it may be moved to an offsite location for archival storage purposes. Thereason to make and keep copies of your data is so that, in the event of some sort of eventor catastrophe that deletes or destroys data, you have a clean copy safely tucked away touse for recovery purposes.
Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is an oldtechnology that has been available almost since the dawn of computing. There are severalissues with tape-based backup:
. Tape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially disruptive to yourapplications; this issue is commonly referred to as the backup window problem. . Because of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups are usually notperformed more than once a day, and often only once every several days, meaning thatthere are very few tape-based recovery points available for use over the course of a week.. Because your data is changing very frequently (on the order of seconds or minutes),fewer recovery points mean you are risking the loss of large amounts of current data fora given recovery. . Once it is clear that a recovery needs to occur, it takes time to perform recovery tasksincluding locating the correct tape, transporting it (if it's offsite), restoring it to disk andrestarting the application with the recovered data.. As a storage media for backup, tape is not entirely reliable; in fact, leading analystgroups such as the Gartner Group, the Enterprise Strategy Group and the Taneja Groupstate that as many as 1 in 4 backup tapes suffer from some sort of problem thatprecludes performing a recovery
Tape-only backups are no Transporting tapes to offsite facilities for archival purposes also has inherent risks. Recentlylonger a feasible data p... [download for more]
|
