Cover Story

The right backup

With data protection concerns on the rise, the SOHO and SMB sectors are looking for efficient and cost-effective backup solutions, finds Faiz Askari.

The differentiating factors between an individual who uses a computer at his home and a large corporation are simple: scalability, protection and performance. Having said this, the need for data storage remains high among small organisations—SOHOs or SMBs.

Backup in SOHOs

In the Small Office-Home Office (SOHO) segment, requirements like growing collections of photos, music, videos, e-mail, and work and school projects are prompting users to consider solutions that permit extra storage to be added with ease in a cost-effective manner. You need to protect data through simple, yet powerful backup measures. Whether you’re a digital video producer, a graphics designer, a gamer, or just anybody who hates twiddling his thumbs while data moves from Point A to Point B, storage performance is critical.

Interestingly, when it comes to scalability, data protection and performance, many technologies that work for big businesses and cost huge sums can be had for much less in SOHO products—if you’re willing to compromise a bit. For instance, you may get the speed but not the protection, or the protection but not the usability. Few products in the market today combine all of these desirable storage characteristics.

Manoj Chugh, President India & SAARC, EMC explains, “The SOHO segment continues to rely upon backup tools such as USB drives, floppies and CD and DVD recordable media. There is a shift in this segment as well. They acknowledge the importance of their data and are spending more money to store it. However, data volumes have increased manifold in the SOHO community.”

Backup@SMBs

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) face the everyday challenge of managing increasing amounts of data while staying within the budget. IT personnel must monitor exponential data growth while managing backup, recovery and archival in the company. With limited internal resources to rely on, these businesses need streamlined, reliable and cost-effective storage processes that are easy to maintain.

An important and difficult area of consideration for SMBs is staffing. For an organisation of 100 people or so it is difficult to justify hiring more than one full-time IT employee. A larger organisation has the luxury of having an IT team or department to manage its set-up, and can even take the help of on-call personnel. For SMBs operating 24x7, however, the worst nightmare is a catastrophic failure requiring restoration from a backup in the middle of the night or over the course of a weekend when the solitary IT person is away. Therefore a backup and restore which is fully automated without requiring the presence of skilled staff can improve performance and security and bring down costs.

Elaborates Dr T R Madan Mohan, Director, Consulting, Information & Communication Technologies, Frost & Sullivan: “Our enterprise studies indicate that many SMBs have no backup plans. Most use server-to-server (workstations used as backup devices are quite common) or CD and DVD recordable media. Only recently, with the adoption of storage-heavy applications such as ERP, have SMB firms attempted to adopt autoloaders, DDS tapes (4mm DAT is the most popular) and continuous data protection (CDP) solutions .”

Chugh of EMC says, “The SMB segment is the fastest-growing from a backup perspective. There were some backup demands from this sector earlier as well, but now, SMBs need a dedicated solution for this purpose. The reasons for this are the same for most SMBs, viz. the fact that they have multiple locations and want to ensure the widest possible geographical spread.”

Options available

Mohan of Frost & Sullivan explains, “SMBs can choose from server-to-server, CD-R media, tape, or CDP solutions. For SOHO set-ups, partitioning a typical 20 GB hard drive into three to four segments and using CD recordable discs are common backup mechanisms. Virtual backups are yet to take off because rarely you see a requirement for say 600 to 800GB in this segment.”  

Adds Neeraj Matiyani, Business Manager, Storage Works Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales, “The current options that are available for this segment are backup solutions based on tape drives and hard disks. Although a portion of these segments uses CD or DVD writers for backup, these technologies are not true archival solutions and are not meant for repetitive use lacking as they do a long shelf life.”

“SMB adoption of backup services is yet to happen in a big way. Our enterprise studies indicate the adoption of these services at an initial stage. Many companies are systematising their CD-R libraries; few have graduated to tape. Automotive, retail, banking (co-operatives) SMBs are investing in backup solutions,” comments Mohan of Frost & Sullivan.  

Vivekanand Venugopal, Director, Software Solutions, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems believes, “Backup and recovery will be the fastest-growing and largest market in India. Consolidation of storage backup, a three-tier data protection architecture i.e. disk-to-disk-to-tape, CDP will drive growth in these markets.”

Neeraj of HP remarks, “Awareness regarding data availability has grown. There is increasing acceptance of formal backup solutions in the lower end of this segment. Mature users are accepting tape automation due to increasing data volumes and the need for a short backup window.” 

“For SMB companies, the major drivers are the adoption of business-critical IT systems such as ERP. Greater integration with their tier-I partners is leading SMBs to backup engineering or business-related information. In some sectors, such as health-related BPOs the legal requirements of HIPAA mandate certain backup procedures and policies,” opines Mohan of Frost & Sullivan.

Needs and demands

Mohan adds, “SMBs and SOHOs have their own needs and demands when it comes to backup. Unlike the case with SOHOs, SMBs need to comply with regulations to protect their businesses from malpractice suits. Therefore they have an economic incentive to adopt backup policies. While SOHOs backup mostly personal data which is often loaded on to their free e-mail (Web mail) server or backed up to CD recordable discs. These offices find no compelling reason for backup. Our estimates of SOHO backup volumes are around 4GB and with 2GB storage space being made available on personal mail servers, there is no economic need for SOHOs to seek pricey solutions at this point of time.”

Venugopal of Hitachi says, “Businesses large and small face similar challenges i.e. grow revenue, reduce cost and reduce risk. It’s simply a function of scale.”

Vendors seem to concur on the above point. Neeraj of HP adds, “Firstly, backup should happen within the available window. Secondly, when required, data recovery should happen in an accurate and timely manner. Lastly, the solution should be easily available. However, the differences lie in the amount of data to be backed up, awareness levels and affordability.”

The three considerations of the SMB and SOHO segments lie in the areas of primary storage performance and expandability, backup and archival functionality, and staffing costs for installation and maintenance of the data protection system.

Sunny John, Country Manager, India, Quantum comments, “This is best summarised by the mantra: store-retrieve-backup-restore-archive.  Attention should be given to the ability of the storage system to scale easily from a small capacity to a large one in easy increments. It is always better and cheaper to buy and install storage as it is required rather than in advance since prices are always on a downward spiral, and performance always improves. The backup and restore architecture must be laid down at the same time as the primary storage and it must also be reliable and scalable.”

Emerging trends

Small organisations need to keep in mind that their storage needs will grow. If they need 300GB of external storage today, they are bound to need much more later. Remember, when everyone thought 10GB was astronomical? Similarly, interfaces improve with time. Today’s USB 2.0, and FireWire 400 (1394a) are transitioning to the faster FireWire 800 (1394b).

Ideally, your storage solution should accommodate all of these so that you’re prepared for whatever system, or peripheral, you decide to connect with in the future as well as today. Industry-leading external storage solutions offer a combination of interface choices and some even come equipped with all the three.

Mohan observes, “CDP solutions are the cutting-edge choice that most vendors are offering to SMB clients today. If affordability issues are addressed rightly they can become the sought-after solutions because of their versatility.”  

ILM: A key component of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is the archiving of data on low-cost media, eg. tape. Companies should go in for the lowest cost medium which is also removable, so a copy can be moved to a secure remote location. This is of utmost importance when you are looking for a disaster management solution at a low cost.

Tiered Storage: Today, the concept of a hybrid solution is gaining importance. The best way to go about this is by combining disk and tape. Tiered storage is like a set of building blocks in the implementation of an ILM strategy. A tiered storage deployment is essential to manage much of the data retention policies for different applications manually or in a semi-automated fashion and hence more labour-intensive. 

WORM: Writing data to the Write Once Read Many (WORM) tape ensures that the information can never be modified by anyone. This feature ensures that nobody can read data stored on tapes if a theft has taken place ensuring a high level of information security.