The Convergence of Data and System Protection

By Tom Schmidt

Not many organizations can say that the way they protect their data and systems is a matter of life and death. The LifeGift Organ Donation Center certainly can.

Houston-based LifeGift works around the clock to give people a second chance at life through its donor organ program. In 2005 alone, 229 donors provided 791 organs for individuals needing life-saving organ transplants in the LifeGift service area.

But before a life can be saved, LifeGift has to gather and manage as many as 30 pages of information per organ. It also needs to document hundreds of medical items: lab test results, X-rays, cardiac tests, biopsies, or invasive lung examinations. And time is short: within hours, organs become unusable.

Needless to say, LifeGift needs to stay resilient and operational at all times. Thanks to new data and system protection solutions it began implementing in January 2006, LifeGift reports it has improved its key recovery metrics by more than 90%. In LifeGift's former disaster recovery plan, the recovery time objective (RTO) to switch four key servers from the primary site in Houston to the satellite office in Ft. Worth was one day. With the new solution, they're switched and running in 26 minutes. The recovery point objective (RPO) used to be 48 hours. Now it's one hour.

While not every organization needs to approach data and system protection in this manner, LifeGift's experience is nevertheless instructive. After all, disaster recovery plays a vital role in keeping every organization's information safe and available. Moreover, the exponential growth rate of today's data volumes, shrinking backup windows, the demand for more effective change management, and the need for fast, reliable recovery are creating stiff challenges for all organizations' disaster recovery efforts.

This article looks at how, given today's volatile business environment, real solutions must offer both superior data protection and superior system recovery.

Protecting your data
Data protection is emerging as one of the most critical aspects of the IT department's mission today. Year-over-year exponential data growth, along with recently imposed regulatory requirements for data retention and availability, take place against a backdrop of increasing threats to the enterprise. Traditionally, tape backups have proven to be an effective and inexpensive means for data protection and recovery, and tape's portability makes it appropriate for off-site storage.

One recent advance in backup is continuous data protection, which provides the core benefits of disk-based protection while eliminating some of the challenges of more traditional technologies. Continuous data protection captures backups of data the moment a file is saved, ensuring that organizations can recover the most recent version of a file in the event of a disaster or data loss and helping organizations to completely eliminate backup windows.

While regularly scheduled backups protect against many types of data loss, backup provides only one layer of availability that businesses need to prevent downtime. Clustering can be used to guard against component failure while ensuring application availability and avoiding substantial downtime. Replication can be used to protect against substantial data loss. Both are vital to retrieving the critical applications of a business operation in the event of a disaster.

Protecting your systems
When organizations think of backup and recovery, it is usually associated with protecting information residing on a server. It is important to remember, however, that this constitutes both data and system information. Too often, so much emphasis is put on the need to protect the data that the system is overlooked. But if the system is not operable, the chances of accessing the data are slim.

When a server operating system fails, it can take eight or more hours (days, in some instances) to rebuild and restore the server. This process includes reinstalling the OS, applications, patches, configuring settings, etc. Moreover, there are no guarantees that the server will be in the exact same state as before the failure took place.

There is also the matter of having to replace the server hardware. Few organizations can afford the luxury of maintaining extra server hardware in case they need to replace an existing system. This introduces the issue of restoring a system to a new and dissimilar piece of hardware, while trying to preserve the integrity of the system state and the availability of the data. Organizations must ensure that their system backup/recovery solutions provide hardware-independent restoration.

By deploying both data protection and system recovery solutions, organizations of any size can realize the benefits of shorter backup times, faster system recovery, and reduced data loss.

Conclusion
Businesses today can't afford to waste valuable time and resources restoring a complete data volume or database when all a user needs is a single file or email message. Likewise, with system downtime costs continuing to escalate, extended downtime can mean the end of a business. To protect their financial viability, enterprises need to be able to perform data restoration and bare metal system recoveries more efficiently and much faster than ever before.

A balanced approach to information availability and security helps ensure that data and systems are kept protected, yet remain accessible wherever, whenever, and to whomever business needs dictate.