Modify Your Storage Backup Plan to Improve Data Management and Reduce Cost

(1)

G00238815

Modify Your Storage Backup Plan to Improve

Data Management and Reduce Cost

Published: 4 October 2012 Analyst(s): Dave Russell

IT leaders and storage managers must rethink their backup procedures to

realize cost savings and improve backup infrastructure resource utilization.

Cloud services are attractive options for selected workloads, as they

alleviate the burden on the data center backup infrastructure.

Impacts

■ _{Storage managers who back up more data than what is required to meet SLAs are seeing}

increases in storage backup costs, failure rates and backup window times.

■ _{Backing up data to cloud services is attractive to storage managers and IT leaders because the}

services offer clarified features and functionality over legacy solutions, and relieve the primary data center backup infrastructure.

■ _{IT managers can save money when backing up less data and retaining backup data for shorter}

time periods.

Recommendations

■ _{Re-examine data and applications being protected, especially SLA terms such as backup}

include/exclude lists, number of versions and retention.

■ _{Move remote office/branch office (ROBO), desktop/laptop and departmental and small or}

midsize business (SMB) backup workloads to the cloud.

■ _{Adopt a layered or tiered backup and recovery approach, possibly backing up the lowest tier}

less frequently; perform fewer full backups for static data, such as every two weeks instead of weekly.

Strategic Planning Assumption(s)

(2)

Analysis

Data protection ranks high on every organization's priority list. However, limited funding and staffing can pose challenges for IT leaders who want to provide comprehensive and failproof services to their end users. To deal with these challenges, organizations need to implement a layered or tiered recovery approach, where backup and recovery is channeled between two or more service levels, each with a different quality of service (QoS) and cost structure.

This research is focused on optimizing the backup and recovery infrastructure.1_{Re-examine data}

being protected, rather than lowering QoS or reducing SLAs for all data. Consider techniques included in this research to help you meet tactical budget challenges and realize cost savings. Do not alter backup policies and procedures in a way that would conflict with external regulations or internal corporate mandates. Regulatory and corporate requirements still dictate how data is protected.

Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for Storage Backup

Impacts Top Recommendations

Backing up data to cloud services is attractive to storage managers and IT leaders because services ease the work of the primary data center backup infrastructure.

•

Move remote office, desktop/laptop, departmental data and SMB data workloads to cloud services first.

•

Using a service as a disaster recovery copy for on-premises backup data can lower costs, mitigate risk and improve data availability.

Storage managers who back up more data than required in SLAs see increases in storage backup costs, failure rates and backup window times.

•

Re-examine the data and applications being protected.

•

Work with line-of-business owners to remove unwanted data from being backed up.

IT managers can save money when backing up less data and retaining backup data for shorter time periods.

•

Use a layered or tiered backup and recovery approach, backing up the lowest tier less frequently.

•

Re-evaluate your data protection plan; reduce backup retention times to 60 or 90 days.

(3)

Impacts and Recommendations

Storage managers who back up more data than what is required to meet SLAs are

seeing increases in storage backup costs, failure rates and backup window times

Organizations with broad backup policies often consume significant resources. Storage

administrators often back up and store data they did not intend to protect. For example, some organizations back up a user's entire drive or all folders and directories.

Some organizations use software distribution solutions, imaging products or server virtualization offerings to deploy OS images. One means of protecting OS images is to use a bare metal recovery (BMR) solution for filtering out OS files from the backup policy. Another approach is to exclude rich media files, such as Audio Video Interleave (AVI), JPEG and MP3 formats, unless there are business reasons to include them.

IT leaders and storage administrators need to revisit backup policies to exclude temporary and problem determination files, such as .tmp and .dmp files. Gartner also recommends that IT leaders create and enforce desktop and laptop policies where only sanctioned data locations, such as a My Documents folder, are protected and backed up. IT leaders can exploit recent backup solution enhancements that include the ability to perform incremental-forever, virtual-full or synthetic-full backups that merge together data and consume less overall storage in the backup repository. To help contain costs, IT leaders need to re-examine the type and amount of data being backed up.

Recommendations:

■ _{Re-examine data and applications being protected, especially SLA terms such as backup}

include/exclude lists, number of versions and especially backup retention.

■ _{Work with line-of-business owners to create or review backup templates and policies for each}

group of users, applications or servers. Remove unwanted data from the backup workload.

■ _{Exploit backup solution enhancements that include the ability to perform incremental-forever,}

virtual-full or synthetic-full backups that merge data and consume less overall storage in the backup repository.

■ _{Be cautious of changing backup policies and procedures in a way that would conflict with}

external regulations or corporate mandates.

■ _{Perform data recovery testing at least once a year on a subset of data to ensure the backup}

strategy effectively meets the stated SLA projections.

Backing up data to cloud services is attractive to storage managers and IT leaders

because the services offer clarified features and functionality over legacy solutions,

and relieve the primary data center backup infrastructure

(4)

optimization techniques, as service-based features and functionality continue to improve.

Organizations are actively considering software as a service (SaaS) and cloud-delivered solutions to protect data in ROBO environments, as well as test-and-development data and endpoints, including desktop, laptop and tablets. Some companies are evaluating these delivery models for regional areas and at least a subset of their primary data centers.

Cloud infrastructure as a service is becoming a backup target for licensed software, either by design or customer initiative. Organizations leveraging outsourcing and SaaS are comfortable with not owning the technologies used to enable their solutions. Some internal IT organizations will become contractors/brokers, managing not only their own IT, but also multisourced IT services from the cloud. IT leaders in enterprise ROBO, departmental and endpoint (desktop/laptop) environments and SMBs likely will back up these workloads to the cloud first.

Recommendations:

■ _{Move ROBO, desktop/laptop and departmental and SMB backup workloads to the cloud.} ■ _{Using a service as an additional or disaster recovery copy for on-premises backup data can be}

a low-cost way to mitigate risk and improve data availability.

■ _{Assess the criticality of data you would like to move to a cloud or SaaS site before}

implementing the process. Pilot a cloud-based backup project using less-critical data.

IT managers can save money when backing up data less and retaining backup data

for shorter time periods

Many organizations are striving to find ways to better protect data, which often includes capturing a copy of the data more frequently. However, some data may not warrant the current backup policy, much less an improved recovery point objective (RPO). In these cases, due either to the low business criticality of the data or the very low change rates of the data, we recommend less-frequent back up. Most backups are used for short-term operational recovery. Many recoveries are used to satisfy restore requests for data that was created recently or deleted, or corrupted from a virus. In each of these cases, the latest data is being recovered, making retention of earlier backups unnecessary.

At the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference, 50% of the respondents to a survey regarding data retention indicated they are keeping backup data for 90 days (one calendar quarter) or less. The trend toward 60-day and 90-day retention has been steadily increasing during the past four years, according to Gartner surveys. Unfortunately, we also still see organizations keeping backup tapes for more than two years. We recommend they archive the solution or provide a long-term records retention solution.

Recommendations:

■ _{Use a layered or tiered backup and recovery approach, possibly backing up the lowest tier less}

(5)

■ _{Re-evaluate your data protection plan. If the primary goal of the backup strategy is to satisfy}

operational recovery requests, then reduce backup retention times to 60 or 90 days.

■ _{Even if there are operational reasons to keep longer-term copies of application data or month/}

quarter/year-end data, consider running a separate backup job and retention policy for that subset of data, so that all data is not subject to the elongated retention.

■ _{Adopt archiving to capture and manage static data or data that needs to be retained longer}

than one year.

Regional Headquarters

Corporate Headquarters 56 Top Gallant Road Stamford, CT 06902-7700 USA

+1 203 964 0096

Japan Headquarters Gartner Japan Ltd.

Atago Green Hills MORI Tower 5F 2-5-1 Atago, Minato-ku Tokyo 105-6205 JAPAN + 81 3 6430 1800 European Headquarters Tamesis The Glanty Egham Surrey, TW20 9AW UNITED KINGDOM +44 1784 431611

Latin America Headquarters Gartner do Brazil

Av. das Nações Unidas, 12551 9° andar—World Trade Center 04578-903—São Paulo SP BRAZIL

+55 11 3443 1509 Asia/Pacific Headquarters

Gartner Australasia Pty. Ltd. Level 9, 141 Walker Street North Sydney

New South Wales 2060 AUSTRALIA

+61 2 9459 4600

© 2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its

Modify Your Storage Backup Plan to Improve Data Management and Reduce Cost