Let The Circle Be Unbroken Why Tapes Can Be A Disaster For Your Disaster Recovery Plan

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Is your company running in circles when it comes to disaster recovery? If not, then it should be! Of course I’m not referring to the traditional meaning of the phrase “running in circles”, but I’m also not going to suggest a traditional approach to disaster recovery either. Before we delve into a new thinking about business continuity management and disaster recovery planning, let’s first take a brief look at where we came from, which frighteningly equates to the status quo for many businesses.

In The Beginning...

In the years before legal mandates for data management practices were in effect, actionable plans for the recovery of lost data in the event of a disaster were on the whole inadequate at best, if even extant. Many factors contributed to the lack of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including:

• A lack of affordable, robust hardware and software technology aimed specifically at tackling data storage and recovery issues
• The absence of a reliable and quick networking medium to transfer data from node-to-node
• Compliance regulations were not yet in place, so standards for the creation and execution of business continuity, record retention, and disaster recovery planning were not as defined. In addition, without these mandates, companies had less “incentive” to invest capital into these projects. Jail time was not yet looming over the heads of IT management.
• The exorbitant costs of storage medium
• A lack of financial and man-power resources allotted to disaster recovery

With many or all of these conditions concurrently influencing data management policies and procedures, a single solution stood out and was adopted above all others- the tape backup system. Tape backup and recovery constituted the lifeblood of a majority of disaster recovery plans. They in some manner circumvent the issues mentioned above, but fail miserably to reliably and consistently meet the rigorous legal standards and business continuity requirements of backup and recovery practices today.

Let's Get On Track...

Let’s look at the concept of business continuity (as it relates to business-critical data availability) as a train running on a track. When everything works as it should, our continuity line remains flat and consistent, and our train steams ahead at the speed of business:


However, when a disaster causes the rail to break, the train stops, our unbroken line develops gaps, and the missing data gives our line a dashed look:

Each gap represents unrecoverable business-critical information, which could mean lost revenue, legal violations, service interruptions, or even total business failure!

But Why Not Tape?

Even with a disaster recovery plan in place, this scenario can and does play out. Fail rates for restoring data from tape backup systems can be as high as 50%. Would you gamble the value of your company’s data on a coin toss? If your disaster recovery plan relies on tape backup, you are doing just that. Let’s examine a few of the steps that would need to occur flawlessly to have a successful recovery of data from tape:

Before the disaster-


When the disaster occurs-


The problems with this recovery scenario are simply too obvious to ignore. For instance, a failure at any one point in the process causes the entire process itself to fail. Imagine each step as a link in a chain. When the question, “What if this can’t happen?” is applied to any of the steps, we are left with a broken link! Simply put- A tape-centric DR solution will always be more prone to failure than an online, D2D solution- because there are far more points of failure to contend with.

It is no secret that in the business world, time really is money, and one of the golden rules of disaster recovery and preparedness is- The quicker your ability to recover lost data, the less impact a disaster will likely have on your company. Each of the steps in a tape-based recovery plan is prone to copious amounts of down time if they fail. Consider these key questions concerning tape-based data storage and recovery:

• Where are the tapes stored?
• Have they been stored properly (i.e. nowhere near magnets)?
• How old are the tapes themselves (even if the backup is hours old)? Over a year? How certain are you that older tapes will be read correctly and restore critical data in the event of a data loss event?
• Did the right tape get changed out at the right time?
• Did current business-critical data get overwritten?
• Did the tape get labeled correctly?
• Does the tape-based software need to start with a ‘full restore’ and then follow with several incremental restores? How long will that take?
• Did you purchase the right tape? Tape drives are format and platform specific. If you do not have the EXACT drive you need to restore the EXACT tape…what will you do?
• Traditional tape backup programs are licensing nightmares. Are you going to be able to get the restore program licensed well enough to restore what you need at 2am?
• Is your licensing agreement such that there is a lag between putting a server in production and getting it backed up, while waiting for the ‘agent’ to be installed and the license turned on?
• Once you start restoring, is the tape going to break? Is it going to jam?
• Tapes that are offsite need to be transported. If they are lost, stolen, or damaged in transit- then what?
• How long are you going to have to wait for your tapes to arrive from an offsite location?
• What if the tape reading hardware were to malfunction? How long would it take to replace or repair the broken equipment?
• Consider a scenario in a tape-based backup environment where a server is destroyed. The server needs to be rebuilt from the ground up using a new hardware device. Tapes backup data stored on the server, but what about the operating system, database installations, applications, system settings, and registry changes? Reinstalling software components and settings from scratch could take several days to several weeks, depending on whether the installation materials are available and ready to be used. Can your business afford to lose complete server functionality for weeks?

As you can see, the answers to these questions determine the success or failure of your entire backup system. Sound like a process management nightmare? If you are currently using a tape system, and you could not answer any one of these questions, then permanent data loss, non-compliance, and interruption in the business continuity model are virtually inevitable. Fortunately there are companies dedicated to resolving these issues, and they have changed the way we think about data security.

Trading the steam engine for a Magnetic Levitation train

Companies resorted to inferior tape-based solutions as part of their disaster recovery plan, because in the beginning, there were no better options. The technology for streamlining a comprehensive, easy-to-use backup and recovery tool was either not yet available, or drastically cost-prohibitive. What solution is able to mitigate the above, while adding tremendous flexibility and ease of administration? Enter the universe of online backup.

This tape-less solution backs up your data to an offsite storage vault, on fault-tolerant storage media, using D2D technology. After the initial backup of your data is complete, the software only sends changes in your data to be stored at the secure facility- reducing the amount of data to be stored, and therefore reducing costs. Before transit, your data is bandwidth-optimized with compression in combination with incremental block-level processing and encrypted, ensuring secure and efficient data transfer.

Need to recover lost data? High end service providers offer a secure web portal, where you can simply log in, select the data that needs to be recovered, and the restoration begins. From this interface, you have the ability to restore a single file or email, or an entire database, at the click of a mouse button. If the data is transferred via a dedicated line, files can be restored during peak hours, or while a backup is being completed, without interrupting business.

Traditionally, not having a local copy meant a very long restore process. Now higher end solutions offer a ‘local restore’ option. Local restore means that short of a major site loss, as long as the local restore computer is not damaged, you can restore from it. In large buildings it makes sense to put the local restore computer as far away from the datacenter as possible (secured, of course.) It is also possible to replicate the local restore computer to another secure site within easy driving distance of the main office- so a local restore can be accomplished very quickly. In addition to these options, an overnight NAS box or USB drive can provide input for local restore as well.

Bandwidth was also a major problem, but high end solutions mitigate this in two ways:

• The initial backup is performed on a USB drive / NAS box, in which the huge backup files are encrypted and overnighted to the provider’s vault. This avoids the initial backup that used to take days or weeks of bandwidth-choking time.
• Delta blocking. Delta blocking is a very high end technology that essentially looks at files to see what has changed in them, and then grabs only the smallest number of 4k blocks that are necessary to reconstruct the current file from the old one. For instance- if a 2GB file has a name in it, and that name changes, rather than send the entire 2GB file again, only 4K is sent. This technology is so powerful that many people back up fairly large amounts of data using dialup connections.

What happens if your online backup service provider experiences an outage? That depends on the provider. If you choose a low end provider who only has one node, one vault, and one facility- and any link in that chain breaks at the same time as yours, then you are completely without a way to recover. It is extremely critical that you insist on verification (initial and ongoing) of the fact that your backup service provider has multiple points of redundancy, high nine’s availability, and near-zero risk of failure.

All backup administration takes time and is an expense. One of the main fallbacks of a tape system is the dispersed management of software and hardware across the enterprise. Top service providers offer centralized administration of local and remote locations, regardless of size.

One burden shared with tape backup is agents. The vast majority of online backup companies require an agent to be placed on each server or PC to be backed up. Some very high end solutions do not. Not having an agent means low cost administration, and overall fewer burdens to use. Imagine the convenience of being able to perform a Bare Metal Restore without installing agent software!

Back to the Circle

The goal of any disaster recovery plan is to maintain the forward motion of the train, with little or no breaks in the track. When a disaster does occur, we want business to remain uninterrupted at best, or at worst get back on track in the shortest amount of time possible. Going back to our train analogy, let’s say we are moving along, and a data loss event occurs at point A in the tracks. When we incorporate a DR plan that utilizes the full resources of a service provider with online backup and recovery with D2D (disk-to-disk) technologies, we quickly and easily can reroute the train to recover the data back to point A and continue pushing business forward.

All of this is accomplished without the added time, extra hardware, software, and personnel dependencies that are required by tape. A disaster recovery program with online restoration as part of the plan allows you to return back to the data state at the time the data loss occurred, taking you full circle, with little or no interruption in service. Truly, “running in circles” is not only the fad in data protection, but it is destined to become a best practice for businesses across the globe.

Author Travis Prim is a technical writer for CRC DataProtection