Your data is critical to your company, and failing to have a well-thought-out data storage strategy could spell the end of your business. In fact, research by Gartner Inc. found that among organizations that have experienced significant data loss, 93 percent were out of business within five years.
With more data being distributed each day, it is becoming increasingly important, as part of your overall strategy, to identify solutions to store and access your data.
“At the beginning of the century, storage strategies were more simplistic than today, usually consisting of primarily dedicated storage,” says Glenn Collura, Sales Engineer at Time Warner Cable Business Class. “As distributed storage became more prevalent, we started to see storage move further from the server. Data connections to storage became more critical to the overall strategy so users could access shared data.”
Smart Business spoke with Collura about backup, recovery and replication of data, and the steps you can take to ensure that your sensitive data is kept safe and secure.
How has data storage changed?
The ability to access remote storage for either production or replication provided additional protection to critical business assets. IP was the most logical solution because most customers had IP networks deployed. In addition, protocols such as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) helped enable remote storage applications. But, there were challenges.
Traditional Telco circuits, such as T-1, could not provide the bandwidth needed for backup and replication, and most optical solutions were fairly expensive. Latency was another problem in getting many storage applications to function at peak performance over the wide area.
What are some of the key points to consider when looking at backup, recovery and replication of data?
There are six key things to look at:
- Distance — How far are you moving the data?
- Bandwidth — How much data must be moved and in what time frame?
- Recovery point objective (RPO) — How much data, if any, can you afford to lose?
- Recovery time objective (RTO) — How quickly do you need to recover?
- Latency — How will it affect your application?
- Budget — How much are you willing or able to spend?
All of these points should be taken into consideration when choosing a data transport. It’s not enough to just order a ‘big pipe’ and assume it will meet your needs. You have to size the facility to meet your RPO and RTO requirements.
Can you afford to be down for an hour? Two hours? A day? There are costs associated with not only the facility but also in lost productivity and possibly customer access, as well.
