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Achieving Rapid
Data Recovery for
Credit Union Core
Processing Applications
An Executive Overview of TEchoStream for AIX WHITE PAPER
Introduction
Continuous member service is an important deliverable for credit unions, and is probably the most obvious sign to members that a credit union has its priorities set appropriately. The right business processes, supported by a reliable information technology (IT) infrastructure, are the foundation on which continuous member service is built. The core component to this foundation is your data, and there are a variety of risks to which this data may be subject - inadvertently deleted ?les or records (operator error), viruses or hackers that can cause data corruption or deletion, and natural disasters that may put much more than just your data at risk.
What is your plan to recover your data?
While data recovery has always been important, there are trends in the industry today that put your data recovery strategy in the spotlight. The continued growth in assets and members means that the impact of downtime is affecting a larger base and is therefore potentially much more costly. Members are now demanding that certain services, such as online banking and ATM, be available 24 hours a day, and outages of these services are very noticeable to an ever increasing audience. Combined with the trend towards consolidation, the cost of downtime may in fact be prohibitive. And depending upon the size of your credit union, certain regulatory requirements for data retention and disaster recovery may be adding fuel to this ?re.
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Issues with Legacy Recovery Technologies
If you're like most credit unions, you're using some form of data protection today - probably tape-based backup. Periodically, someone shuts down the core processing system to perform a backup to tape. Depending on the volume of data that is being copied, this may take several hours and requires manual intervention to set up the backup job, run it, con?rm that it occurred, and then return the core processing system to operation. The backup copy may be kept locally in case data needs to be recovered in the near term, and eventually (after several weeks) it may be moved to an offsite location for archival storage purposes. The reason to make and keep copies of your data is so that, in the event of some sort of catastrophe that destroys data, you have a clean copy safely tucked away to use for recovery purposes.
Leading analyst groups, such as Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is an old the Gartner Group, the Enterprise technology that has been available almost since the dawn of computing. There are Strategy Group and the Taneja several issues with tape-based backup: Group, state that as many as 1 in . Tape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially disruptive to your 4 backup tapes suffer from some applications; this issue is commonly referred to as the backup window problem. sort of problem that precludes performing a recovery. . Because of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups are usually not taken more than once a day, and often only once every several days, meaning that there are very few tape-based recovery points available for use over the course of a week; this is problematic because your data is changing very frequently (on the order of seconds or minutes) and the fewer points in time you have a copy of (for recovery purposes) the more data loss on average occurs for a given recovery; this issue is commonly referred to as the recovery point objective (RPO) problem .
. Once its clear that a recovery needs to occur, it takes time to perform the recovery (e.g. ?nding the right tape, transporting it (if its offsite), restoring it to disk, restarting the application on top of the data, etc.); this issue is commonly referred to as the recovery time objective (RTO) problem.
. As a storage media for backup, tape is not entirely reliable; in fact, leading analyst groups such as the Gartner Group, the Enterprise Strategy Group and the Taneja Group state that as many as 1 in 4 backup tapes suffer from some sort of problem that precludes performing a recovery.
Transporting tapes to offsite facilities for archival purposes also has inherent risk. Widely publicized tape losses durin... [download for more]
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