How cloud storage improves disaster recovery

When Bill McCown joined Situs six years ago, the Houston-based real estate firm was confident of growth prospects, and the company believed it was necessary to upgrade tape-based backup systems. Shortly after September 2008, Hurricane Ike attacked Houston. McCown, the company's IT director, recalls: "Our data center survived, but the office power supply hasn't been restored for a whole week." "Although employees who work in other locations have access to the data center, the headquarters is offline and unable to communicate."

When the McCown team weathered the initial turmoil caused by the storm, the company began to seriously consider improving its backup practices. "We realize that if the data center is offline, we've backed everything up to tape," McCown said. Although the data is well preserved, we cannot recall the backup tapes, so we have no way to use this information, and it is impossible to move the information to other locations without a power outage. ”

For the company, serious consideration of the solution to Remote Storage has become a real problem to be solved.

Cloud based storage is a timely and live

After evaluating several vendors in 2010, Situs decided to use Evault Backup technology and i365 services to build its own cloud-based storage solution. The latter is a California-based storage system provider for small and medium-sized Enterprises, and a subsidiary of Seagate. "The i365 company's relationship with Seagate makes it very attractive to CEOs," McCown said. He pointed out that he was looking for a firm with both technical strength and enduring service capability.

In addition, I365 also provides a cloud-based storage system and onsite storage systems, which is one of the reasons for adding points. Although McCown had hoped to use the cloud to meet all the storage needs of situs, the pure cloud strategy was not realistic, given the realities of the business. Although the situs company itself is not subject to laws and regulations, its clients, including many banks, financial institutions, investment enterprises, real estate investment trusts, as well as mutual funds, are subject to regulatory restrictions.

McCown explains: "If you put all the storage in the cloud, you have to face a lot of regulatory compliance restrictions." Whenever we introduce third parties that can access some of our data, we have to worry about the security implementation of these third parties and whether their practices will lead us to not be able to carry out our business efficiently. ”

As a result, Situs decided to keep most of the production data within the enterprise, using only a cloud-based remote Data system to perform backup and recovery functions, to handle e-mail and Citrix applications.

Situs's Hybrid storage method includes a disk-based evault device. The device is in the datacenter and is used to run backups, replacing the dozens of tape devices that the company originally used. Situs also relies on Evault services to implement replication and disaster recovery operations in the cloud. Unproductive data is sent from the device to the cloud via a VPN. To reduce security concerns, situs encrypts all data during the backup and is encrypted before being sent, and is encrypted at remote locations.

"We can keep the data locked and encrypted and make it inaccessible at any time," McCown said. This is consistent with our customers ' compliance and security requirements because they require that the data not be exposed. "In the event of a disaster, situs can use the Evault remote disaster recovery system to bring data back online."

The many advantages of cloud storage

One of the advantages of situs implementation is a significant reduction in the time it takes to run a full backup, and the backup window has been compressed from 2.5 days to just 7 hours. Although the volume of data is not huge, usually only 8 TB, many of the data are distributed in the company's 10 office locations, and must be extracted from the network before they can be backed up.

There are several key factors that can save time, such as increased disk-based system speed and the ability to run all system backups at the same time (tape backups are limited to the number of drives available). McCown says the most critical factor is the way the system works. The full backup only physically backs up the changed files, compressing them together with the unchanged files. In addition, Situs uses WAN optimization to reduce the amount of traditional data over the network.

"We can actually make a full backup overnight, which usually takes a whole weekend," McCown said. "In most cases, situs no longer has to use tape (in addition to software mirroring), and recovery time is significantly shortened." At present, Situs can recover most of the data in a matter of minutes, in the past it takes a consumed to get the tapes needed for recovery, and sometimes a 500-dollar emergency extraction fee per tape is required to get the tapes from a remote location.

With cloud Backup technology, the company's IT department can focus on day-to-day internal operations without worrying about backup and disaster recovery. In the past, employees spent a lot of time doing day-to-day backup work, such as verifying backups, processing tapes, and running backup work. Now they can spend more time at a higher level of network engineering work. Of the company's 13 it employees, backup-related work takes only 20 minutes a day.

While the initial concern over cloud computing has evaporated, McCown still challenges human resources. "We still have to understand cloud technology and how to use it more effectively," he said. "While in-house IT staff are well trained to cope with a variety of situations, they can perform better in other jobs and achieve higher mission expectations when they no longer need to be distracted to deal with storage tasks," McCown said.

"Although the backup work has been handed over to the cloud, my team still spends time every day understanding the system and making sure that the backup is still available through the console if necessary," he said. ”

Another big advantage of cloud-based storage is that situs can get extra space just by calling. When situs evaluates this hybrid storage solution, McCown that the company expects data growth of about 150% over the next three years. Situs has experienced 250% per cent growth in data and has added nearly 50% employees since January.

McCown said: "We have experienced an unforeseen increase in data volume, so we must pay more attention to the internal storage system." "Therefore, situs must adjust the way that data is saved on the local device. To free local resources, the company no longer saves annual data for five years on its original schedule, but stores it in the cloud.

On the cost side, Situs saves about $1200 per month on tape and tape library maintenance, and also saves 1000 of dollars a month on tape preservation and extraction fees. In addition, situs no longer needs full-time staff to handle backup work, which is unavoidable when using tape systems. McCown says he believes the biggest advantage of cloud storage is that situs can turn all backup capital expenditure into a single repetitive operating expense.

"Overall, this monthly independent cost is very close to tape," explains McCown. But the benefit is that we don't have to pay to buy a backup disaster-recovery data center, and we don't need to spend a fortune to get someone to help us manage such a data center. ”

In short, situs has achieved greater value with similar costs.

It is also worth mentioning that most of the company's migration to the cloud has achieved seamless transition. Although McCown hopes never to meet a hurricane like Ike, he believes that if something like this happens again, situs and its IT operations can deal with the next storm.