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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedPlanning for backup and recovery: the key elements for a successful backup and recovery strategy
Computer Technology Review, March, 2004 by James Dow
A multi-terabyte system, however, with a low RTO (less than 10 minutes) and a large RPO (greater than 72 hours) may be accommodated by tape as the restoration process may take place at preemptive set intervals to prepare for rapid recovery, but such a scenario may fail due to the generation of the backup data sets exceeding the allowable MPO. The RTO, RPO, MPO, and identification of necessary data and compute elements within the enterprise are the primary result of the BIA and provide the business requirements for a backup and recovery solution. Backup and recovery solutions that cannot clearly articulate the provisioned objectives or source of their definition are seldom viewed as successful implementations.
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Technical Impact Analysis
Following the BIA is the Technical Impact Analysis or TIA. The TIA is the process by which the business requirements are mapped to technical requirements. The TIA identifies additional technical considerations, such as an application-specific requirement to suspend active transaction processing during backup or replication, sensitivity to network architecture and latency. A critical component to be considered during the TIA is the arbitrage of diversely distributed data elements of enterprise data. For example, a transaction may be captured by a primary system, which maintains state information on the transaction while simultaneously updating another database. Without properly correlating the backup and recovery processes, each database may maintain independent referential integrity, but the correlation between the two may be lost. The collection, collation, and aggregation of these technology-specific elements develop into the technical requirements for a backup and recovery solution.
Differing technologies (such as mass storage array-based synchronous or asynchronous replication, operating system replication, "snap" or BCV copies, tape generation and cloning, and multi-phase dual-site commit databases) all provide points on the continuum of availability and resiliency, and can be combined to offer the necessary RTO, RPO, MPO, economic performance and operational viability required by the enterprise.
Armed with the business and technical requirements, in conjunction with the capabilities of the various technologies, the system administrator has the information required to engineer and develop the required infrastructure for backup and recovery. It is important to note that backup and recovery can no longer be considered to be simply the tape backup environment, but rather the whole range of potential solutions for the provisioning of availability and resiliency.
Once the TIA is complete and firm technical requirements with potential solutions have been identified, the system administrator must perform a financial analysis of the viable solutions. Initial capital expense, increases in operating costs associated with operational personnel or re-occurring monthly network access fees, media costs, maintenance costs, and the GAAP accounting treatment of these expenses should be taken into consideration. The financial analysis ensures that the projected solution set will provide the appropriate economic performance for the enterprise.
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