Five signs of risk aversion to backup disaster

Although backup technology has made great strides in the near future, the company's IT staff is still a layman in data backup. But when the backup environment suffers catastrophic damage, everyone (especially the CIO) wants to know who is failing. To protect your data--in fact, to protect your work--this article explains five of these signs, which may indicate that your backup environment will attract widespread attention in the near future.

The hardware is having problems

If your capital expenditures (especially for disk-based backup products) grow at a rapid pace, easing backup pressure, but don't expect too much. Because tape is portable and continuous, it's cumbersome to use, but that's not the root cause of the problem with your backup environment. I have a lot of trust in Backup-to-disk technology, but I've often seen virtual tape libraries (VTL) not fully successful. Why? Many large VTL implementations have been driven by the belief that VTL can solve all backup problems. Moreover, it is easy to assume that disks are definitely faster than tape, thus deploying "first-generation VTL", complicating the already complex issues (client performance, networking, backup servers, software deployments, and so on, whatever you can say).

Do you have metrics (metrics)?

If you can't judge capacity, growth, success, failure, or performance, you don't understand the status of your backup environment. In many environments, backup starts "Lights Out", and I often find severe backup failure rates-30% to 60% a day, and a lot of capacity problems. Poor backup performance, which directly affects data recovery capabilities; Therefore, if you do not manage according to metrics, you will eventually encounter difficulties in terms of capacity, performance, data recovery, and so on.

Offline media management (vaulting) incomplete

is offline media management sacrificed to maintain daily backups? This short-term survival strategy is not too bad, but in the long run it is easy to fail when an offline backup copy expires or is no longer relevant. Most backup environments play a primary and/or two level role in a disaster recovery (DR) scenario, and in order to work, you must copy the current copy of the backup data to an offline site. Traditionally, the process is done by offline tape management media, which needs to be "replicated" once a day. If offline media doesn't replicate every day, it means you're in danger, and if you don't fix it in time, you'll probably fall behind forever. When a disaster occurs, everyone wants to know why they can only recover data from two weeks ago, when all the sights will fall on you.

Key Personnel (Linchpin)

Most backup environments have many components, is there an engineer who really understands the backup environment? Not everyone understands these methods, so who knows who will succeed in keeping the backup environment stable and operational. The market's demand for these skills is high, and the "key person" may leave to look for better opportunities (if the job doesn't force him to leave). If important resources are lost, the expertise to keep the environment running will also be lost. In less than a few months, a very good backup environment will deteriorate as a result of lack of expertise and strategy, which is inevitable if "key personnel" leave.

Treat backups as entities (utility)

Obviously, this is a philosophical term, but I do see a lot of old backup infrastructures that support world-class data centers. If you manage backups in the form of static entities, such as antivirus software, you may experience failure. Backup is a dynamic I/O machine that relies heavily on performance, network size and state, storage, server, and software components. If you look back at the entire datacenter, you'll find that people don't compare applications from I/O and architectural dependencies. The backup scenario is managed as a core infrastructure scenario, or you are prepared to accept endless questions and passive actions.