Cloud Storage "rescue" the case of disaster recovery

When Bill McCown joined Situs six years ago, it was confident about its growth prospects and its Houston-based real-estate business and the company found it necessary to upgrade its tape-based backup system. Not long ago in September 2008, Hurricane Ike struck Houston. McCown, now IT director at the company, recalls the scene at the time, saying that although the data center that struck us was finally over, office power was still not restored for a whole week. Although employees working in other locations have access to the data center, the headquarters are offline and un-communicable.

As McCown's team survived the initial turmoil, the company began to seriously consider improving its backup practices. McCown said: "We realized that if the data center was off-line and we had everything back up to tape, and although we did not have the data back in, we would have no alternative Using this information, it is also not possible to transfer the information to other locations in the event of a power outage. "

For the company to seriously consider the solution to achieve remote storage has become a real problem to be solved.

Cloud-based storage emerges from time to time

In 2010, after evaluating multiple vendors, Situs decided to use EVault's backup technology and i365 services to build its own cloud-based storage solution. The latter is a California-based storage system provider that serves SMEs and is a Seagate subsidiary. McCown said: "i365's relationship with Seagate makes it a very attractive company CEO." He pointed out that he was looking for a both technical strength, but also have long-lasting service capabilities of the manufacturers.

In addition, i365 provides both cloud-based storage systems and on-site storage systems, which is one of the reasons for its extra points. While McCown had hoped to leverage the cloud to meet all of Situs's storage needs, the sheer cloud strategy was not practical considering the realities of the company's business. Although Situs itself is not subject to laws and regulations, its clients, including many banks, financial institutions, investment companies, real estate investment trusts, and mutual funds, are subject to statutory restrictions.

McCown explains: "If you put all your storage in the cloud, you have to face a number of regulatory inconsistencies and we have to worry whenever we introduce third parties that access some of our data Whether the security enforcement of these third parties and their practices lead us to conduct our business efficiently. "

As a result, Situs decided to leave most of its production data in-house, using only one cloud-based remote data system for backup and recovery to handle e-mail and Citrix applications.

Situs's hybrid storage approach includes a disk-based EVault device. The device is located in the data center and is used to run backups, replacing dozens of tape devices originally used by the company. Situs also relies on EVault's services for replication and disaster recovery operations in the cloud. Nonproductive data is sent from the device to the cloud through the VPN. To reduce security concerns, Situs encrypts all data internally during backups, encrypts the data, and sends the data encrypted, all encrypted at a remote location.

McCown said: "We are able to keep these data locked and encrypted and inaccessible at all times, which is in line with our customers' compliance and security requirements because they require that data should not be exposed "In the event of a disaster, Situs was able to use the EVault remote disaster recovery system to bring data back online.

Many advantages of cloud storage

One of the benefits of Situs is a dramatic reduction in the time it takes to run a full backup; the backup window has been compressed from 2.5 days to just seven hours. Although the amount of data is not huge, it is typically only 8 TB, but much of this data is distributed across 10 of the company's offices and must be extracted over the network before it can be backed up.

The time savings, including several key factors such as increased disk-based system speed and the ability to run all system backups simultaneously, with tape backups limited to the number of available drives. McCown said the key factor is the way the system works. Full backup only through the physical backup of the changes in the document, its compressed and unchanged files together. In addition, Situs also uses WAN optimization to reduce the amount of traditional data traversing the network.

McCown said: "We can actually make a full backup overnight, which used to take a full weekend in the past." In most cases, Situs eliminates the need to use tape (except for software mirroring) and restores Time is also greatly reduced. Currently, Situs recovers most data in a matter of minutes, and in the past it took a day or two to get the tape it needs for recovery, sometimes paying $ 500 for each tape in order to get it from a remote location Emergency withdrawal fee.

With cloud backup technology, the company's IT department can focus on day-to-day operations within its own operations without having to worry about backup and disaster recovery issues. In the past, employees spent a lot of time performing routine backup tasks such as verifying backups, processing tapes, and running backup jobs. Now they can devote more time to higher-level web projects. Of the 13 IT staff at the company, backup-related work consumes only 20 minutes each day.

Although initial concerns about cloud computing to reduce its work have vanished, McCown still poses a human resources challenge. "We still have to understand cloud technologies and how to use cloud technologies more efficiently." McCown said that while internal IT staff are well-trained to handle a variety of situations, they no longer need to be distracted by the storage Aspects of the task, in other work can be a better performance, to achieve higher mission expectations.

"While the backup has been delivered to the cloud, my team still spends a lot of time on understanding the system every day, ensuring backups are still available from the console when necessary."

Another big advantage of cloud-based storage is that Situs can get extra space with just a phone call. When Situs rates this hybrid storage solution, McCown believes the company expects data growth of about 150% for the next three years. Situs has experienced 250% growth in data and has added nearly 50% of its staff since January.

McCown said: "We have experienced an unforeseen increase in the amount of data, so we must pay close attention to the internal storage system." Therefore, Situs must save the data on the local device to be adjusted. To free up local resources, the company no longer saves its annual data for five years as originally planned, but stores it in the cloud.

On the cost side, Situs saves about $ 1,200 a month on tape and tape library maintenance and saves $ 1,000 per month on tape storage and retrieval fees. In addition, Situs no longer needs to hire full-time employees to handle backup jobs that are inevitable when using tape systems. McCown said he sees the biggest advantage of cloud storage in that Situs is able to translate all of its backup capital expenditures into a single, recurring operating expense.

McCown explains: "Overall, this monthly overhead costs are very close to tape expenses, but the benefit we get is that we do not have to spend money on spare disaster recovery data centers and we do not have to pay big money Go find someone to help us manage such a data center. "

In short, Situs achieved greater value with similar costs.

Also worth mentioning is that most of the company's migration to the cloud has been seamlessly transitioned. Although McCown hopes to never again encounter a hurricane like Ike, he believes that if something like that happens again, Situs and his IT operations are well positioned to cope with the next storm.