Protecting your mission-critical apps

Backup and recovery have come a long way. For years, organizations were relegated to using tape-based solutions, which were cumbersome, inefficient, and fell uncomfortably short of most recovery goals. Today, disk-based backup together with next-generation technologies for data protection help ease the challenges of meeting recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

That said, organizations still face a number of pressing needs. For example, many businesses need data protection methods that will allow them to recover their data more than just once a day; they need options that will continuously protect their applications throughout the day and allow them to quickly recover their data. In addition, organizations need comprehensive backup management software rather than a proliferation of point tools to meet their data protection requirements.

Of course, there are also some things organizations simply do not need. For example, they do not need data protection solutions that impact the performance of their critical applications. Nor do they need to struggle with backup windows as they perform off-host backups or backups to tape.

Fortunately, next-generation technologies have emerged aimed at combining the most advanced continuous data protection technologies with broader backup and recovery platforms to provide a more complete solution for complex data center environments.

A Step at a Time
To improve RPOs and RTOs, many organizations have turned to technologies such as array-based snapshots, database transaction logs, and the like. Snapshots improved recovery times, although taking multiple scheduled snapshots every day was often acutely taxing both on storage budgets and on systems.

Other organizations, intent on protecting their databases, have opted to leverage their database’s own transaction log capabilities in order to rebuild the database to a specified point in time in the event of certain events. However, if the database system went down, the logs were unavailable—thereby rendering this recovery approach inadequate and ineffective in many circumstances.

Enter continuous data protection (CDP) tools. Designed to constantly capture changes to an application and make it easier for administrators to roll back to any point in the protection timeframe, these point tools offer a welcome alternative to traditional protection methods. Yet, while recovering data to any point in time promises to reduce data loss, finding the appropriate point in time from which to restore has been difficult with these point tools.

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