Betting the company

Short of networking itself, backup and recovery systems touch more of your infrastructure than anything else. So it’s pretty common for any backup and recovery specialist to be asked how we can protect a ten or sometimes even twenty year old operating system or application.

Sure you can backup Windows 2012, but what about NT 4?

Sure you can backup Solaris 11, but what about Tru64 v5?

Sure you can backup Oracle 12, but what about Oracle 8?

These really are questions we get asked.

I get these questions. I even have an active Windows 2003 SMB server sitting in my home lab running as an RDP jump-point. My home lab.

Gambling the lot

So it’s probably time for me to admit: I’m not really speaking to backup administrators with this article, but the broader infrastructure teams and, probably more so, the risk officers within companies.

Invariably we get asked if we can backup AncientOS 1.1 or DefunctDatabase 3.2 because those systems are still in use within a business, and inevitably that’s because they’re in production use within a company. Sometimes they’re even running pseudo-mission critical services, but more often than not they’re just simply running essential services the business has deemed too costly to migrate to another platform.

I’m well aware of this. In 1999 I was the primary system administrator involved in a Y2K remediation project for a SAP deployment. The system as deployed was running on an early version of Oracle 8 as I recall (it might have been Oracle 7 – it was 17 years ago…), sitting on Tru64 with an old (even for then) version of SAP. The version of the operating system, the version of Oracle, the version of SAP and even things like the firmware in the DAS enclosures attached were all unsupported by the various vendors for Y2K.

The remediation process was tedious and slow because we had to do piecemeal upgrades of everything around SAP and beg for Y2K compliance exceptions from Oracle and Digital for specific components. Why? When the business had deployed SAP two years before, they’d spent $5,000,000 or so customizing it to the nth degree, and upgrading it would require a similarly horrifically expensive remediation customization project. It was, quite simply, easier and cheaper to risk periphery upgrades around the application.

It worked. (As I recall, the only system in the company that failed over the Y2K transition was the Access database put together at the last minute by some tech-boffin-project manager designed to track any Y2K incidents over the entire globe for the company. I’ve always found there to be beautiful irony in that.)

This is how these systems limp along within organisations. It costs too much to change them. It costs too much to upgrade them. It costs to much to replace them.

And so day by day, month by month, year by year, the business continues to bet that bad things won’t happen. And what’s the collateral for the bet? Well it could be the company itself. If it costs that much to change them, upgrade them or to replace them, what’s the cost going to be if they fail completely? There’s an old adage of a CEO and a CIO talking, and the CIO says: “Why are you paying all this money to train people? What if you train them and they leave?” To which the CEO responds, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?” I think this is a similar situation.

I understand. I sympathise – even empathise, but we’ve got to find a better way to resolve this problem, because it’s a lot more than just a backup problem. It’s even more than a data protection problem. It’s a data integrity problem, and that creates an operational integrity problem.

So why is the question “do you support X?” asked when the original vendor for X doesn’t even support it any more – and may not have done for a decade or more?

The question is not really whether we can supply backup agents or backup modules old enough to work with these systems unsupported by their vendor of origin, and whether you can get access to a knowledge-base that stretches back far enough to include details of those systems. Supply? Yes. Officially support? How much official support do you get from the vendor of origin?

I always think in these situations there’s a broader conversation to be had. Those legacy applications and operating systems are a sea anchor to your business at a time when you increasingly have to be able to steer and move the ship faster and with greater agility. Those scenarios where you’re reliant on technology so old it’s no longer supported are exactly those sorts of scenarios that are allowing startups and younger, more agile competitors to swoop in and take customers from you. And it’s those scenarios that also leave you exposed to an old 10GB ATA drive failing, or a random upgrade elsewhere in the company finally and unexpectedly resulting in that critical or essential system no longer being able to access the network.

So how do we solve the problem?

Sometimes there’s a simple workaround – virtualisation. If it’s an old x86 based platform, particularly Windows, there’s a good chance the system can at least be virtualised so it can at least run on modern hardware. That doesn’t solve the ‘supported’ problem, but it at least means greater protection: image level backups regardless of whether there’s an agent for the internal virtual machine, and snapshots and replication to reduce the requirements to ever have to consider a BMR. Usually being old, the amount of data on those systems is minimal, so that type of protection is not an issue.

But the real solution comes from being able to modernise the workload. We talk about platforms 1, 2 and 3 – platform 1 is the old mainframe approach to the world, platform 2 is the classic server/desktop architecture we’ve been living with for so long, and platform 3 is the new, mobile and cloud approach to IT. Some systems even get classified as platform ‘2.5’ – that interim step between the current and the new. What’s the betting that old curmudgeonly system that’s holding your business back from modernising is more like platform 1.5?

One way you can modernise is to look at getting innovative with software development. Increasing requirements for agility will drive more IT departments back to software development for platform 3 environments, so why not look at this as an opportunity to grow that development environment within your business? That’s where the EMC Federation can really swing in to help: Pivotal Labs is premised on new approaches to software development. Agile may seem like a buzz-word, but if you can cut software development down from 12-24 months to 6-12 weeks (or less!), doesn’t that mitigate many of the cost reasons to avoid dealing with the legacy platforms?

The other way of course is with traditional consulting approaches. Maybe there’s a way that legacy application can be adapted, or archived, in such a way that the business functions can be continued but the risk substantially reduced and the platform modernised. That’s where EMC’s consultancy services come in, where our content management services come in, and where our broad experience to hundreds of thousands of customer environments come in. Because I’ll be honest: your problems aren’t actually unique; you’re not the only business that’s dealing with legacy system components and while there may be industry-specific or even customer-specific aspects that are tricky, there’s a very, very good chance that somewhere, someone has gone through the same situation. The solution could very well be tailored specifically for your business, but the processes and tools that get used to get you to your solution don’t necessarily have to be bespoke.

It’s time to start thinking beyond whether those ancient and unsupported operating systems and applications can be backed up, but how they can be modernised so they stop holding the business back.

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