The Backup Blog

A Story About Data Domain and Disaster Recovery Testing

If you have been involved with backup and recovery for any length of time, you probably know two things: one, you should be doing DR tests, and two, you don't do them as often as you should (or ever, in some cases).
 
Why do they get performed so infrequently? Because they are painful. And I mean really painful. Try packing up 5000 tape cartridges, some of your top IT operations people, and a whole bunch of operations manuals and run books and heading off to a cold room without windows for three days of work. That would be 3 eighteen hour days, usually. Over a weekend. Not only is this not a whole lot of fun for anybody involved, but there are two other problems.

The Trend to Disk for Off Site Backup

This piece, discussing the benefits of moving to an all disk backup solution, caught my eye. It struck me because I think the author is just right—there are a lot of good reasons to be moving from Disk to Disk to Tape (where tape is used for offsite) to Disk to Disk to Disk. Reliability, durability, recoverability, and so on all favour disk as an off-site target. I think the author is also picking up on an important secular trend that is largely inevitable at this point: disk as the only target for backup and recovery system.

But there is another important reason to move to all disk: cost. I will have more to say about the TCO of disk backup solutions shortly, but one of the most striking, and perhaps counterintuitive things about D2D2D is that it usually has a better Return On Investment (ROI) and a relatively lower TCO than D2D2T. That is to say: using disk for off-site rather than tape is usually easier to cost justify than using disk for onsite.

What Curve Are You On?

Here we are, almost a year and a half after the acquisition of Data Domain by EMC. In this time the Data Domain team has become part of the EMC Backup Recovery Systems division. And that division has been wildly successful in the last 16 months. Now there are a thousand reasons for the success, not least the astounding level of execution in the integration effort and the comparative ease with which the Data Domain and EMC teams joined together. But another key part of the success has been the technology. Simply put, the inline, CPU bound methodology is beginning to demonstrate the real strength of this approach.