Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability

In 2013 I undertook the endeavour to revisit some of the topics from my first book, “Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy”, and expand it based on the changes that had happened in the industry since the publication of the original in 2008.

A lot had happened since that time. At the point I was writing my first book, deduplication was an emerging trend, but tape was still entrenched in the datacentre. While backup to disk was an increasingly common scenario, it was (for the most part) mainly used as a staging activity (“disk to disk to tape”), and backup to disk use was either dumb filesystems or Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL).

The Cloud, seemingly ubiquitous now, was still emerging. Many (myself included) struggled to see how the Cloud was any different from outsourcing with a bit of someone else’s hardware thrown in. Now, core tenets of Cloud computing that made it so popular (e.g., agility and scaleability) have been well and truly adopted as essential tenets of the modern datacentre, as well. Indeed, for on-premises IT to compete against Cloud, on-premises IT has increasingly focused on delivering a private-Cloud or hybrid-Cloud experience to their businesses.

When I started as a Unix System Administrator in 1996, at least in Australia, SANs were relatively new. In fact, I remember around 1998 or 1999 having a couple of sales executives from this company called EMC come in to talk about their Symmetrix arrays. At the time the datacentre I worked in was mostly DAS with a little JBOD and just the start of very, very basic SANs.

When I was writing my first book the pinnacle of storage performance was the 15,000 RPM drive, and flash memory storage was something you (primarily) used in digital cameras only, with storage capacities measured in the hundreds of megabytes more than gigabytes (or now, terabytes).

When the first book was published, x86 virtualisation was well and truly growing into the datacentre, but traditional Unix platforms were still heavily used. Their decline and fall started when Oracle acquired Sun and killed low-cost Unix, with Linux and Windows gaining the ascendency – with virtualisation a significant driving force by adding an economy of scale that couldn’t be found in the old model. (Ironically, it had been found in an older model – the mainframe. Guess what folks, mainframe won.)

When the first book was published, we were still thinking of silo-like infrastructure within IT. Networking, compute, storage, security and data protection all as seperate functions – separately administered functions. But business, having spent a decade or two hammering into IT the need for governance and process, became hamstrung by IT governance and process and needed things done faster, cheaper, more efficiently. Cloud was one approach – hyperconvergence in particular was another: switch to a more commodity, unit-based approach, using software to virtualise and automate everything.

Where are we now?

Cloud. Virtualisation. Big Data. Converged and hyperconverged systems. Automation everywhere (guess what? Unix system administrators won, too). The need to drive costs down – IT is no longer allowed to be a sunk cost for the business, but has to deliver innovation and for many businesses, profit too. Flash systems are now offering significantly more IOPs than a traditional array could – Dell EMC for instance can now drop a 5RU system into your datacentre capable of delivering 10,000,000+ IOPs. To achieve ten million IOPs on a traditional spinning-disk array you’d need … I don’t even want to think about how many disks, rack units, racks and kilowatts of power you’d need.

The old model of backup and recovery can’t cut it in the modern environment.

The old model of backup and recovery is dead. Sort of. It’s dead as a standalone topic. When we plan or think about data protection any more, we don’t have the luxury of thinking of backup and recovery alone. We need holistic data protection strategies and a whole-of-infrastructure approach to achieving data continuity.

And that, my friends, is where Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability is born from. It’s not just backup and recovery any more. It’s not just replication and snapshots, or continuous data protection. It’s all the technology married with business awareness, data lifecycle management and the recognition that Professor Moody in Harry Potter was right, too: “constant vigilance!”

This isn’t a book about just backup and recovery because that’s just not enough any more. You need other data protection functions deployed holistically with a business focus and an eye on data management in order to truly have an effective data protection strategy for your business.

To give you an idea of the topics I’m covering in this book, here’s the chapter list:

1. Introduction
2. Contextualizing Data Protection
3. Data Lifecycle
4. Elements of a Protection System
5. IT Governance and Data Protection
6. Monitoring and Reporting
7. Business Continuity
8. Data Discovery
9. Continuous Availability and Replication
10. Snapshots
11. Backup and Recovery
12. The Cloud
13. Deduplication
14. Protecting Virtual Infrastructure
15. Big Data
16. Data Storage Protection
17. Tape
18. Converged Infrastructure
19. Data Protection Service Catalogues
20. Holistic Data Protection Strategies
21. Data Recovery
22. Choosing Protection Infrastructure
23. The Impact of Flash on Data Protection
24. In Closing

There’s a lot there – you’ll see the first eight chapters are not about technology, and for a good reason: you must have a grasp on the other bits before you can start considering everything else, otherwise you’re just doing point-solutions, and eventually just doing point-solutions will cost you more in time, money and risk than they give you in return.

I’m pleased to say that Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability is released next month. You can find out more and order direct from the publisher, CRC Press, or order from Amazon, too. I hope you find it enjoyable.