As Technology Moves Forward,
Data Protection Does Too
By MIKE TALON
Nnear the beginning of the digital revolution, computation devices relied on punch cards and other physical media to house information. This data was not stored solely in digi- tized form, but rather was converted to physical machine-readable information when it was required, so that the actual data
remained in some other format. Ledgers, files, and other information storage systems were kept in secure locations, and backup
meant copying the data to more files, ledgers, and storerooms.
Then the computers started to acquire permanent storage
devices, and data that was held on them was not simply a temporary copy of information stored in hardcopy. Huge tape reels
were safeguarded and copied to ensure data was held on more
than one piece of storage equipment, and vaults were established
to house data on tape and other media. The paradigm created in
the physical, hardcopy world was ported over to the digital world.
For a while this worked, but eventually the technology outgrew
the simple idea of locking away the media for safekeeping. The
changes most likely began the first time a tape was pulled back
from the vault after years locked away, when two major issues
would have been noticed.
First, any physical media is subject to degradation over time.
Tape can break if overused, but it also can succumb to just the
eventual breakdown of the physical materials from which it is
made. Though it takes a good deal of time for a plastic-based tape
substrate to fall apart, it happens. Mold, mildew, bacteria, and
other common agents in the air can be devastating to tape media
if they’re permitted to begin growing on it. Dank, dark basements
(where vaults usually ended up) would lead to expedited decomposition of the tape media itself, and that meant data loss.
The second issue was that technology changes over time. The
huge reel-to-reel tape systems used years ago are nowhere to be
found today. Even a difference of one or two years can be the difference between using a back-up tape successfully and having an
unrecognizable format over your data. So when data from several
years back was recalled from the vault, even if the tape was sound,
there was no guarantee you would the proper device to read it.
These issues led to the idea of keeping large amounts of data
on spinning disk. Tape backup was used to keep a secondary copy
of the data only, not the primary copy. It was here that backup
really took shape as a protocol of its own, as opposed to just
another copy of the data that might be used as the primary copy
at some point. Each month, or week, or night, a copy of all data
changed since the last backup would be committed to tape and
stored someplace safe, so that if the primary copy was destroyed
or removed from the disk, this tape could replay the data back
onto a new disk.
Tapes were made more reliable and long-lasting. As much as
possible, tape drives were made backwards-compatible. Even
when that wasn’t possible, tape devices had become small enough
that keeping one of the old ones around after an upgrade wasn’t a
hardship. This let data sit longer on tape safely and gave a better
chance that the tape could be used even years after it was finalized.
However, as with all things, technology marches on. Demands
of the end-users and management quickly outpaced the ability of
a tape-based system to keep up. Today, it’s expected that an entire
data system can be brought back online with all data and applications quickly – often within the same business day of the outage
or even less time. The idea of recalling certain archived data from
a back-up system is still very much alive, but organizations now
demand that same recall ability on the entire system, not just data
objects. While a fast tape-based system could probably re-create
a single server quickly enough, if a data-system is comprised of
multiple physical or virtual systems, tape recovery can take well
longer than the business is willing to tolerate.
To assist in meeting the current goals of most organizations,
vendors began creating hybrid solutions that allowed IT staff
to create a mid-line copy of the data on spinning disk, then to
shuttle the older back-up information to tape. They also created
the ability to protect and restore an entire server, including applications and OS components. The solutions worked great if you
could get the original hardware working or if you could acquire
a nearly identical piece of hardware, but offered little flexibility
otherwise. Modern organizations began to desire a higher level
of flexibility that could move from system to system as required,
without limitations on hardware and without the need to collect
several incremental backups to restore the latest data set.
The latest backup systems allow for not only the ability to
restore data components on-demand at various points in the data
lifecycle, but to restore entire data systems back to one or more
different servers when necessary. The idea is to protect the data
using a methodology that allows all changes to the information to
be check pointed, allowing for object-level recovery of anything
from a single file to all data on a server. This is paired with the
ability to return that data to either the original server or any other
system capable of reading that data-type.
If there is no system capable of reading that data type due to
loss of one or more systems, these tools also have the ability to
restore the entire server with applications, switches and settings
intact. Different solutions vary in their flexibility, with some able
to restore the system to any piece of hardware capable of running
the base OS instruction set that the failed servers held, regardless
of the underlying hardware.
The latest solutions for data protection go well beyond what
our predecessors simply called “backup,” but the idea is the same.
Nothing should exist at a single point, and everything should be
able to change as the times demand it.
v
Mike Talon is a technology professional living and working in New York
City. Currently a subject matter expert in Microsoft Exchange technologies
for Double-Take Software, Talon has worked for companies from individual
consult firms through Fortune 500 organizations. Talon has had the opportunity to design systems from all over the technological spectrum.
