Distributed Enterprises have an interesting dilemma that they have had to solve for years with regards to protecting their data at hundreds and sometimes thousands of remote sites. Bank branches, retail chains, and any other type of business that has to deal with protecting ever changing data at multiple remote sites has to solve this problem. Often no technical staff is onsite; therefore the reliability and consistency of any backup solution is severely compromised.

There are a number of ways that IT Pros deal with remote site data protection – some are good and some are not so good, but with today’s technologies there are lots of options.

Some deploy point solutions where they backup all critical data to a locally attached inexpensive tape device. Others will run backups over a WAN, providing they have the bandwidth. Some simply keep multiple copies onsite just in case the primary storage device gives way. In the past few years however, there are a number of other alternatives that simplify the otherwise demoralizing task of ensuring data protection at hundreds or thousands of remote sites.

For those that recall the SSP (Storage Service Provider) boom or “plop” depending on how you look at it, you may recall that the intent was to setup private networks for companies where they could either keep their primary storage at well protected colocation providers or they could simply have their data backed up there. This concept had some promise, but never really took off as originally expected. The issue I saw was that no self-respecting IT Director would want to have his “crown jewels” somewhere else. I know, when I was running IT shops I certainly couldn’t ever bring myself to do it! This concept of backing up systems offsite has found a place however in backing up desktops and workstations. There are a number of remote site backup providers out there that have carved a pretty nice niche providing remote desktop backup services! This works especially well at remote sites with no IT staff.

For primary data at remote sites many organizations are turning to asynchronous replication as a viable alternative. Steve has a nice blog entry on replication and considerations for remote sites.

For many, the quick and dirty fix for a failing tape backup scenario it to replace it with a disk-based backup scenario. (See previous entry “Is Tape Backup dead?”) For many remote sites this fixes the reliability problems of managing tape backups at hundreds of remote sites. And that, in and of itself, is enough. It could be anything from a single drive USB solution to a VTL device. You could also add in some snapshots or a replication package to get the data back to a central data center for permanent backup.

Purpose-built, all-in-one devices for the remote sites are another option. Many NAS appliances can replace existing servers and supply all data protection needs for desktops, laptops, and other servers. Some even have built-in capabilities for taking snapshots of data, backing up data to tape and even replicating data offsite. Adaptec’s Snap Servers can supply these types of services.

WAFS (Wide Area File System) is another technique that’s getting some press. WAFS allows companies to maintain all of their data in a centralized location for better protection and backup while allowing for “almost” real-time access to the centralized data at any remote site. It’s a pretty elegant solution, but if you have hundreds of sites it’s likely to be cost prohibitive.

For high availability requirements where uptime is the main concern synchronous mirroring techniques can be deployed. Although similar to an asynchronous replication configuration, this scenario is best suited for redundant site protection with complete failover scenarios. It also requires that the sites are close enough for high speed interconnects to support the mirroring package. Not a technique that works for more than a couple of sites though and very expensive.

In the end, it’s my experience that if you consider the budget, performance, reliability, availability and recoverability for your Distributed Enterprise you’ll find that one of the above solutions will likely support your needs.

As always – let me know what you think and what other original ways you use to protect the data at remote sites.

Blog ya later!

Joe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 and is filed under General, Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.