From affordable ATA-based offerings to smarter backup applications, new capabilities are challenging the status quo in the backup and archival process.

Speaking at the forum Making Storage Simple last week, Jon Murray, Regional Program manager, Business Continuity, EMC, noted that businesses have to grapple with a 40-50 per cent growth in information annually.

In the traditional backup and archive process, the production environment is constantly growing and there is a need to continually add expensive Tier 1 capacity. The backup environment capacity is also impacted. Recovery takes much longer, if at all, and more tape drives or silos are needed to meet service level agreements.

All these have a knock-on effect on the archive environment, which also grows. It then becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve content when requested.

The optimal approach, according to Murray, would be to extract valuable non-production information to archive, which will recover capacity on Tier 1 resources and improve performance of production applications.

Active production information can be backed up to disk, reducing or even eliminating the backup window and increasing the likelihood of full backups. This has been made possible by the emergence of affordable ATA disk-based offerings which allow faster backup and restore, and ensure increased uptime because the smaller backup windows mean less impact on application and system availability. EMC?s backup-to-disk deployment options include the Celerra NS Series, Clariion CX Series and the Clariion Disk Library.

?Move the right data to the right place at the right time, with the least effort.?

Data can then be retrieved from archive or recovered from backup as required.

Increasingly, the discussion is also moving from pure backup to restore, said Murray. This is important because even though 75 per cent of storage management is backup and recovery, 30 percent of all data recovery instances fail due to botched backups, he added, quoting findings from Forrester Research.

Backup and restore also have competing requirements. When accelerating backups, incremental or differential backup techniques may be applied, or many servers may be multiplexed to reduce the backup window. When it comes to accelerating recovery however, the preference would be to recover from full backups for reliability.

A distinction should also be made between backup and archival. He pointed out that in many large organizations, backup and archival operations are kept separate because they serve different purposes. For example, backup and recovery focuses on improving availability by enabling an application to be restored. It involves a secondary copy of information, is typically short-term (weeks or months), and the data is typically overwritten on a periodic basis. It is also not driven by regulatory compliance requirements.

Archival, on the other hand, adds operational efficiencies by moving some of the content out of the operational environment. Archival involves a primary copy of information and is typically long-term ? months, years or even decades. As such, the data has to be maintained for analysis, value generation or compliance.

Adding to the permutations is the fact that the value of different types of information ? for example, email, database, production files, development code, MPEG files ? changes over time.

There is thus a need to implement appropriate recovery objectives at the right cost.

?There has to be levels of recovery,? said Murray. ?There has to be choice for the different layers and levels of applications.?