1. I D C A N A L Y S T C O N N E C T I O N
Robert Amatruda
Research Director, Data Protection and Recovery
Disaster Recovery: Improving Time to
Readiness
March 2011
For many organizations, the volume of data continues to increase even as they experience demands
for increasingly faster disaster recovery (DR) responses. To manage data volumes and disaster
recovery requirements, many enterprises are deploying disk systems in conjunction with data
deduplication technologies. Using deduplication storage for data protection can help organizations
achieve two goals: efficiently manage the growing data volumes and be prepared to handle the most
pressing disaster recovery scenarios. Most customers are challenged with recovery of their backup
data in a timely and efficient manner. Recovery of backup data can pose many challenges because it
is generally not replicated like data written to tier 1 disk for rapid recovery. In many instances,
customers must restore their backup data from removable media such as tape. Restoring backup
data from tape can be time consuming, cumbersome, and costly. In essence, disaster recovery
readiness is never fully realized when one is restoring backups from tape.
The following questions were posed by EMC to Robert Amatruda, research director of IDC's Data
Protection and Recovery service, on behalf of EMC's customers.
Q. What is the most common disaster recovery architecture you see in the market today,
and what are some of the challenges associated with this architecture?
A. Currently, the most common disaster recovery architecture in place still relies on shipping
tapes via truck to a DR site where data is stored offsite in case the primary site is unavailable
for recovery. There are significant challenges with this tape-based approach, including the
costs of tape management and the risk of tapes being lost or stolen.
Moreover, rapid and reliable recovery of data can be very problematic if the data resides on
physical tape cartridges. To restore a data volume from physical tape, a customer needs to
locate the tape cartridge. In some cases, that may mean recalling a tape cartridge from an
offsite location. This adds countless hours to the restore time and requires numerous
personnel. In addition, once the tape is recalled, there is a possibility that the data will no
longer be readable because of tape corruption.
Q. How has technology evolved to the benefit of customers in terms of improving
disaster recovery and the ability to meet service-level agreements (SLAs)?
A. Disaster recovery solutions continue to evolve to meet ever-challenging SLAs. Customers
are utilizing more disk-based systems with deduplication for faster and more efficient backup
and recovery. Deduplication allows customers to remove redundant backup data and move
only unique data to the DR site. In addition, with proper design, these systems allow users to
concurrently back up, deduplicate, and replicate for the fastest time to DR readiness. As a
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2. result of these advantages, large customers are increasingly forgoing tape for backup and
disaster recovery functions in favor of disk-based solutions with data deduplication and
network-efficient replication capabilities. Disk-based storage systems with these capabilities
provide more effective SLAs for disaster recovery and preparedness.
Q. Deduplication is the hottest topic in backup and recovery as well as storage in
general. What value can deduplication technologies bring to disaster recovery
planning?
A. Deduplication technology addresses many of the long-standing backup and disaster recovery
challenges that large firms have been grappling with for well over a decade. These
challenges include keeping up with rapid data growth and shorter backup windows, as well
as enabling more efficient replication and faster recovery from operational and disaster-
related failures. These challenges can be overcome by eliminating redundant data from
backups and sending only unique data to the DR site. Firms can easily integrate
deduplication technology into existing infrastructures and can significantly improve their
disaster recovery preparedness and more effectively control their capital and operational
expenditures.
Data deduplication provides much more efficient storage and management of backup data
volumes. Customers can take advantage of replication to a DR site or for remote site
consolidation with greatly reduced backup data volumes. This allows customers to more
effectively utilize their WAN infrastructure for centralized management of backups and realize
significantly improved disaster recovery. Furthermore, deduplication eliminates the need to
ship physical tape cartridges to offsite repositories.
Q. There are numerous different approaches to deduplication in the marketplace. What is
the most important thing to examine when evaluating deduplication solutions and their
ability to provide more effective disaster recovery readiness?
A. Data deduplication continues to dramatically improve the economics of IT by minimizing
storage footprint requirements, backup windows, and network bandwidth consumption in
distributed environments and datacenters. IDC data shows that deduplication is accelerating
backup and recovery efficiencies and helping companies of all sizes control their capital and
operational costs. However, it is important to keep in mind that there are two different
approaches to deduplication available today: inline and postprocess.
Organizations must evaluate each approach carefully with regard to backup requirements,
disk capacity, and disaster recovery objectives.
Inline deduplication provides organizations with an efficient and economical method of
deduplication because it eliminates redundant data before it is written to disk so that a disk
staging area is not needed. In comparison, postprocess deduplication analyzes and reduces
data after it has been written to disk; thus, additional disk capacity is needed to store data
before the deduplication process. Postprocess deduplication causes significantly slower time
to DR readiness because replication cannot begin until data has been deduplicated.
Given these two different deduplication approaches, customers must clearly understand their
desired time to DR readiness. In today's ever-changing and dynamic environment,
organizations must invest in technology that improves performance, optimizes existing
resources, and measurably lowers costs. Systems with inline deduplication allow efficient
replication and improved time to DR readiness. Organizations no longer have to rely solely
on a tape-based disaster recovery methodology that falls woefully short for disaster
preparedness.
2 ©2011 IDC

3. Q. If an organization is looking at rearchitecting its disaster recovery strategy, what are
the keys to a successful implementation?
A. Any organization, especially one with large data and application requirements, needs to be
very judicious when considering rearchitecting its disaster recovery strategy. An organization
needs to evaluate the pros and cons of each vendor and solution and also must consider the
maturity of the disaster recovery solutions. An organization must take a holistic approach to
this evaluation and must consider its environment and application needs, including staff
resources.
Another factor that must be weighed is the need for single-point or multipoint replication or
remote site disaster recovery and backup. Disaster recovery covers numerous components
such as disk systems, application software, and people and practices. Any potential group of
solutions needed for disaster recovery must easily integrate into the existing infrastructure
and application environment and operate with any leading backup or archive application.
More importantly, any disaster recovery implementation must have a high level of resiliency
and be customer proven.
A B O U T T H I S A N A L Y S T
Robert Amatruda is a research director of IDC's Data Protection and Recovery service, covering hardware and software
solutions that enable business continuity. He is responsible for analyzing and forecasting data protection and recovery
solutions on a worldwide basis. This augments his coverage of the tape hardware, removable magnetic storage, and virtual
tape library markets.
A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N
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