by Kevin Falconer, general manager, Channel Data

The importance of business critical information cannot be ignored by almost all organisations in both the public and private sectors today. The challenges facing these organisations include how to securely backup, store and archive data and – when necessary – rapidly retrieve and restore data.

Two solutions have emerged in recent times, each based on a specific business philosophy, underpinned by evolving technologies. There is debate over which is best.

While there is little common ground between the protagonists of information lifecycle management (ILM) and next generation backup solutions, both the concepts are based on the perceived monetary value of the information to be protected. The shared belief is that certain types of data have a greater value to the business than others and, by the same token, the older the data, the less valuable it is in terms of its ‘criticality’ to the business.

ILM, as is obvious, addresses the management of data throughout its lifecycle – from origin to archive. In an ILM solution data is first graded – according to its importance to the business – and then allocated to a particular type of primary storage.

Decisions are based on such issues as the data access speeds required, the availability of storage systems and a host of criteria including what type of backup is required, such as ‘replication’ or ‘snapshot’.

Decisions also have to be taken concerning the media needed to support the chosen management strategy – such as disk or tape or a combination of the two, perhaps in disk-to-tape or disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) in the case of a more sophisticated solution.

In an ILM solution, as data ‘ages’ its criticality to the business is deemed to diminish and so it is moved to a lesser type of disk (slower read/ write access speeds, not as highly available, etc).

As time progresses, the ILM strategy evolves further, mandating a more ‘traditional’ approach characterised by the use of slower tape media and less frequent backups.

The challenges facing organisations that opt for the ILM route include the difficulties associated with the determination of the value of every bit of information generated by the company and its categorisation and re-categorisation over time.

In addition, the initial costs linked to the deployment of ILM solutions, because of their inherent complexity, are extremely high - as are those associated with the on-going maintenance of the solution.

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in an ILM solution is the difficulty associated with its automation, as there are so many different types of data to label and multiple methods of determining value.

Protagonists of next generation backup solutions address the issues from a more straight forward ‘backup-and-recovery perspective’. For example, they link different types of data – not with value – but with recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Essentially RPOs and RTOs dictate how quickly lost data must be recovered and from what point in time the recovery must take place. These are determined by the importance – or criticality - of the information to the business.

While different types of data are given specific RTOs and RPOs - and as such are treated separately in the backup phase – the age of the data is not a criterion as most next-generation database-type backup applications store all the data - old and new - in the same facility.

Of course, next generation backup solutions have challenges too. In this instance the key down-fall is the high cost of the tools necessary to implement them initially. And as the volume of data being protected grows over time, so do the costs of the tools and the management overhead.

Is there a winning technology?

In my opinion the ideal solution would be a ‘mix-and-match’ of the two. In this scenario, an organisation would take into account the type of data (database, financial application, file, or print data, etc) and determine the type of primary storage, backup and recovery strategy required.

The next step would be to apply ‘best practice’ policies to the critical systems that require the high-end primary storage and next-generation backup and recovery solutions in order to reduce the costs associated with them.

Perhaps a word of caution is necessary as this exercise, unless undertaken by specialists in this field, could add complexity to the solution which, in turn, would ramp up the costs in the long term.

The rule of thumb, then, is to tackle the problems associated with backup and archiving with the help of a consultant who has detailed knowledge of the current and upcoming legal requirements for the storage of email, memos, invoices and other business-critical documents and tailor a multi-faceted system to suit the requirements of their storage.