The designing of backup environments

The cockatrice was a legendary beast that was a two-legged dragon, with the head of a rooster that could, amongst other things, turn people to stone with a glance. So it was somewhat to a basilisk, but a whole lot uglier and looked like it had been designed by a committee.

You may be surprised to know that there are cockatrice backup environments out there. Such an environment can be just as ugly as the mythical cockatrice, and just as dangerous, turning even a hardened backup expert to stone as he or she tries to sort through the “what-abouts?”, the “where-ares?” and the “who-does?”

These environments are typically quite organic, and have grown and developed over years, usually with multiple staff having been involved and/or responsible, but no one staff member having had sufficient ownership (or longevity) to establish a single unifying factor within the environment. That in itself would be challenging enough, but to really make the backup environment a cockatrice, there’ll also be a lack of documentation.

In such environments, it’s quite possible that the environment is largely acting like a backup system, but through a combination of sheer luck and a certain level of procedural adherence, typically by operators who have remained in the environment for long enough. These are the systems for which, when the question “But why do you do X?”, the answer is simply, “Because we’ve always done X.”

In this sort of system, new technologies have typically just been tacked on, sometimes shoe-horned into “pretending” they work just as the old systems, and sometimes not used at their peak efficiency because of that general reluctance to change such systems engender. (A classic example for instance, can be seen where a deduplication system is tacked onto an existing backup environment, but is treated like a standard VTL or a standard backup-to-disk region, without any consideration for the particularities involved in using deduplication storage.)

The good news is, these environments can be fixed, and turned into true backup systems. To do so, there needs to be four decisions made:

1. To embrace change. The first essential step is to eliminate the “it’s always been done this way before” mentality. This doesn’t allow for progress, or change, at all, and if there’s one common factor in any successful business, it’s the ability to change. This is not just representative of the business itself, but for each component of the business – and that includes backup.
2. To assign ownership. A backup system requires both a technical owner and a management owner. Ideally, the technical owner will be the Data Protection Advocate for the company or business group, and the management owner will be both an individual, and the Information Protection Advisory Council. (See here.)
3. To document. The first step to pulling order out of chaos (or even general disarray and disconnectedness) is to start documenting the environment. “Document! Document! Document!”, you might hear me cry as I write this line – and you wouldn’t be too far wrong. Document the system configuration. Document the rebuild process. Document the backup and recovery processes. Sometimes this documentation will be reference to external materials, but a good chunk of it will be material that your staff have to develop themselves.
4. To plan. Organic growth is fine. Uncontrolled organic or haphazard growth is not. You need to develop a plan for the backup environment. This will be possible once the above aspects have been tackled, but two key parts to that plan should be:
• How long will the system, in its current form, continue to service our requirements?
• What are some technologies we should be starting to evaluate now, or at least stay abreast of, for consideration when the system has to be updated?

With those four decisions made, and implemented, the environment can be transfigured from a hodge-podge of technologies with no real unifying principle other than conformity to prior usage patterns into a collection of synergistic tools working seamlessly to optimise the data backup and recovery operations of the company.