{"id":6322,"date":"2017-06-07T17:03:24","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T07:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=6322"},"modified":"2018-12-11T08:36:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T22:36:22","slug":"would-you-buy-a-dangerbase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2017\/06\/07\/would-you-buy-a-dangerbase\/","title":{"rendered":"Would you buy a dangerbase?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Databases. They&#8217;re expensive, aren&#8217;t they?<\/p>\n<p>What if I sold you a&nbsp;Dangerbase instead?<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s a&nbsp;dangerbase!? I&#8217;m glad you asked. A dangerbase is functionally almost exactly&nbsp;the same as a database, except it may be a little bit more lax when it comes to&nbsp;controls. Referential integrity might slip.&nbsp;Occasionally an insert might&nbsp;accidentally trigger a background delete. Nothing major though. It&#8217;s twenty percent less&nbsp;of the cost with only four times the risk of&nbsp;one of those pesky &#8216;databases&#8217;! (Oh, you might need 15% more infrastructure to run it on, but&nbsp;you don&#8217;t have to worry about that until implementation.)<\/p>\n<p>Dangerbases. They&#8217;re&nbsp;the next big thing. They have&nbsp;a marketshare that&#8217;s doubling every two years! Two years! (Admittedly that means they&#8217;re just at 0.54% marketshare at the moment, but that&#8217;s double what it was last year!)<\/p>\n<p>A dangerbase is a stupid idea. Who&#8217;d trust&nbsp;storing their mission critical data in a dangerbase? The idea is preposterous.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, dangerbases get considered all too often in the world of data protection.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2017\/06\/07\/would-you-buy-a-dangerbase\/destroyed-railway-bridge-over-the-river-in-the-woods\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6324\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6324\" src=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/bigStock-Broken-Bridge.jpg\" alt=\"Destroyed Bridge\" width=\"900\" height=\"598\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/bigStock-Broken-Bridge.jpg 900w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/bigStock-Broken-Bridge-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/bigStock-Broken-Bridge-768x510.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s a dangerbase&nbsp;in the world of data protection?&nbsp;Here&#8217;s just some&nbsp;examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Relying solely on an&nbsp;on-platform protection mechanism. Accidents happen. Malicious activities happen. You need to always ensure you&#8217;ve got a copy of your data outside of the original production platform it is created and maintained on,&nbsp;regardless of what protection you&#8217;ve got in place there. And&nbsp;you should at least have one instance of each copy in a different physical&nbsp;<em>location<\/em> to the original.<\/li>\n<li>Not duplicating your backups.&nbsp;Whether&nbsp;you call it a clone or a copy or a duplication doesn&#8217;t matter to me here \u2013 it&#8217;s the effect we&#8217;re looking for, not individual product nomenclature. If your&nbsp;backup isn&#8217;t copied, it means your backup represents a single point of failure in the recovery process.<\/li>\n<li>Using post-process deduplication. (That&#8217;s something I covered in detail <a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2017\/05\/05\/architecture-matters-when-you-dedupe\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">recently<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>Relying solely on RAID when you&#8217;re doing deduplication. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.emc.com\/collateral\/software\/white-papers\/h7219-data-domain-data-invul-arch-wp.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Data Invulnerability&nbsp;Architecture<\/a> (DIA) isn&#8217;t just a buzzterm, it&#8217;s essential in a deduplication environment.<\/li>\n<li>Turning your databases into dangerbases by doing &#8220;dump and sweep&#8221;. Plugins have existed for decades. Dump and sweep is an expensive&nbsp;waste of primary storage space&nbsp;<em>and<\/em>&nbsp;introduces a variety of risk into your data protection environment.<\/li>\n<li>Not having a data lifecycle policy! Without it, you don&#8217;t have control over capacity growth within your environment. Without that, you&#8217;re escalating your primary storage costs unnecessarily, and placing strain on your data protection environment \u2013 strain that can easily break it.<\/li>\n<li>Not having a data protection advocate, or data protection architect, within your organisation.&nbsp;If data is the lifeblood of a company&#8217;s operations, and information is money, then failing to have a data protection architect\/advocate within the organisation is like not bothering&nbsp;with having finance people.<\/li>\n<li>Not having a disaster recovery policy that integrates into a business continuity policy. DR is just one aspect of business continuity, but if it doesn&#8217;t actually slot into the business continuity process smoothly, it&#8217;s as likely going to hinder than help the company.<\/li>\n<li>Not understanding system dependencies. I&#8217;ve been talking about system dependency maps or tables for&nbsp;years.&nbsp;Regardless of what structure you use, the net effect is the same: the only way you can properly protect your business services is to know what IT systems they rely on, and what IT systems&nbsp;<em>those<\/em> IT systems rely on, and so on, until you&#8217;re at&nbsp;the root level.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s just a few&nbsp;things, but&nbsp;hopefully you&nbsp;understand where I&#8217;m coming from.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been living and breathing data protection for more than twenty years. It&#8217;s not just a job, it&#8217;s&nbsp;genuinely something I&#8217;m passionate about. It&#8217;s something everyone in IT needs to be&nbsp;passionate about, because it can literally make the difference between your company surviving or failing in a disaster situation.<\/p>\n<p>In my book, I cover all sorts of considerations and&nbsp;details from a technical side of the equation, but the technology in any data&nbsp;protection solution is just one&nbsp;aspect of a very multi-faceted approach to ensuring data availability. If you&nbsp;want to take data protection within your&nbsp;business up to the next level \u2013 if you want to avoid having the data&nbsp;protection equivalent of a dangerbase in your business \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Data-Protection-Ensuring-Availability\/dp\/1482244152\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">check my book out<\/a>. (And in the book there&#8217;s a lot more detail about&nbsp;integrating into IT governance and business continuity, a thorough coverage of&nbsp;how to work out system&nbsp;dependencies, and all sorts of details around data protection advocates and the groups&nbsp;that they should work with.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Databases. They&#8217;re expensive, aren&#8217;t they? What if I sold you a&nbsp;Dangerbase instead? What&#8217;s a&nbsp;dangerbase!? I&#8217;m glad you asked. A dangerbase&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,17],"tags":[1241,1366,749],"class_list":["post-6322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backup-theory","category-policies","tag-architecture","tag-dangerbase","tag-policy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1DY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6322"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7384,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6322\/revisions\/7384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}