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Iron Mountain Inc. helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions. Its name stems from its beginnings in 1951, when a depleted iron ore mine in upstate New York was converted to an underground records storage center designed to protect vital corporate records in the event of a nuclear attack.Today's businesses depend on access to their own information not only to succeed in the marketplace, but first and foremost, to survive in it. The pervasiveness of computing resources in business operations makes access to critical business data imperative. Loss in productivity from downtime is expensive, regardless of the size and resources of a business.
Imagine the impact on a successful advertising agency from losing access not only to its billing, accounting and customer information but also to stored images of successful campaigns essential to closing new business. Picture the dilemma of an insurance company forced by a local disaster to re-create, not only internal data on employees and payroll, but data on customer policies and deductibles.
Ensured, rapid access to data is as critical to the success of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), Iron Mountain's fastest-growing business segment, as it is to large companies—and the cost in lost productivity of downtime and time-consuming recovery efforts is even more devastating.
A number of concerns challenge businesses of all sizes in achieving these goals. The sheer volume of business data on various types of servers (file and print servers, email and database servers) continues to increase, as does its assessed value (as much as $1 million per 100 megabytes, according to the valuation of many companies). A wide variety of compliance regulations make every business, regardless of size or complexity, as susceptible as the very largest companies.
Protecting data servers outside data centers
SMBs share many of the same fundamental goals as larger businesses in protecting business data, but there are significant differences between the data protection workflow inside a large-company data center and the workflow at most SMBs. Most SMBs measure their data in gigabytes, not terabytes like larger companies often do, with critical applications like accounting, customer information and email running on a fraction of the number of servers. In fact, the majority of smaller businesses are managing one to three servers. SMBs also tend to have both fewer and less-experienced technical staffers.
SMBs require one low-overhead solution that addresses each step in their data protection workflow—backup, removal, storage and recovery—and do so effectively within their resource constraints.
Finding a viable alternative
It is not surprising to learn that more than 37% of small and medium-size businesses have already deployed disk-based backup solutions—and nearly another one-third are considering it now. These solutions include disk-based backup and recovery with integrated online services.
As the name implies, these integrated solutions combine a local disk device with an online backup and recovery service accessed through a broadband Internet or wide area network (WAN) connection. Backups occur automatically on a nearly continuous and/or scheduled basis, depending on the solution. Data is compressed, encrypted and transmitted to an off-site data storage vault, and optionally, an on-site disk backup appliance. Data restores can occur online or from the local disk backup appliance.
These solutions not only relieve staff of the effort of learning complex procedures and the time to manage additional technologies like tape or tape-disk hybrids, but they also make the process of backup and recovery automatic: "set-it-and-leave-it."
What should be in your package?
Below are some of the key characteristics to look for when evaluating online disk-based backup and recovery solutions to protect your server data:
To help SMBs meet their objectives for what to recover and how quickly, most disk-based solutions replace traditional nightly backup techniques with a more continuous form of data protection. Different solutions offer a variety of techniques to save copies of changed data to a protected disk, giving the user varying degrees of ability to recover to specific points-in-time.
In order to achieve comprehensive and reliable backup that will deliver the kind of granularity you need at recovery time, there are some key features to look for in a solution:
• Delta change engines that transmit only the data that changes in files and databases—a highly efficient approach that minimizes both server load and bandwidth usage and optimizes fast recovery; they may also offer snapshots and filters to reduce the impact on system performance.
• The ability to save those changes to an off-site location via an integrated online service.
• An efficient way of rolling up point-in-time windows and coalescing them into more-comprehensive time frames—for example, multiple backups within a day into a single daily backup; multiple daily backups into monthly backups, etc.
• Checkpoint or point-in-time restart capability that automatically ensures that backup and restore jobs survive node failures and network resilience problems.
• Built-in protection (native support) for open files and databases—representing some of your business's most important data—enables backup of these files while they are in use, without disrupting your business flow.
• Make sure the solution not only backs up data but also allows you to back up system information—for easily restoring a full system when on-site technical staff is limited.
• The solution should offer customers flexibility in defining retention scheduling and policies for data on a per server or per folder basis, so that certain categories of data (e.g., financial) may be retained for years, but others for shorter time frames.
• A multitier architecture that allows greater freedom to drag and drop jobs onto redundant vaults—e.g., through RAIN technology (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) that can provide fully automated data recovery in a local area network.
• A fully automated disk-based backup and recovery solution requires minimal or no technical staff involvement—and allows remote server management from one location when desired for larger, multilocation SMBs.
• When they choose to, authorized users should be able to manage and monitor the entire backup and recovery process anywhere and anytime.
• Online Web-based management should make it easy for the user to create customized backup policies; check status; audit jobs and users; initiate restore operations; and retrieve all versions of data quickly from a Web-based catalog of historic versions.
• The initial setup of the solution should be as painless as possible—not so complex that it requires special staff or a long time to learn and configure, as for example, solutions requiring additional products to extend and complete them or involving numerous components installed at various locations, adding additional steps to the setup process.
-- Drawn with permission from an Iron Mountain white paper. To read the entire paper, click here:
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