computerwoche.de

Archiv

Killing risk, unifying data protection

27.02.2007
The most successful companies are those that have been able to reinvent themselves and adapt to changing user demands and competitive landscapes. In IT, it is equally important to question and reevaluate why we do the things we do. Often, practices have been adopted at a tactical level to address a particular need with little consideration for other related requirements. Over time, this approach can lead to a hodge-podge of solutions that may partially overlap but lack unified direction or management.

In data protection, this can be evidenced by the variety of data protection techniques applied within an organization -- nightly backup, snapshot, mirroring, database dumps, database log-shipping, host-based replication, storage array-based replication -- to name a few. I'm not suggesting that these approaches are not serving a valid purpose or even that they cannot all be applied effectively within a given environment. However, employing multiple tactical solutions without an overall unified data protection strategy can be both wasteful and risky.

One way to begin to form a unified strategy is to consider the range of data protection risks that need to be addressed. Some are obvious, while others may be less so. Among the more common are the following:

-- Physical device failure -- Loss of a storage element or connectivity to that element. This is typically addressed by redundancy, e.g., RAID, multipath I/O, etc.

-- Detectable logical data loss -- Accidental deletion or corruption. Commonly addressed by point-in-time data copies, e.g., backup, snapshot, database dump, split mirror.

-- Site loss -- Large scale data recovery because of a site outage. Remediated through disaster recovery planning, including recovery from off-site media or various kinds of replication.