Ready or not, here comes the cloud and, for many organizations, backup to the cloud is squarely in their sights. However backup to the cloud does not mean they should abandon the best of what today’s localized backup processes have to offer. By instead taking a hybrid approach to cloud backup such as what Western Digital (WD®) offers, they can get on a secure path to storing data in the cloud without breaking either their backup processes or their budget.
Data Growth Driving Cloud Acceptance
Everyone already knows how quickly their data stores are growing. IBM finds that 90% of all data is less than two (2) years old and it expects data to grow by another 800% in the next five (5) years.
This rapid data growth is prompting companies to minimally use the cloud to store data because they cannot internally keep up with demand. ESG recently found in a survey of 500 IT professionals that 28% of organizations already have cloud accounts for online storage with that percentage expected to increase to 50% in 2013.
The even larger challenge confronting organizations is obtaining enough storage capacity to backup and recover all of this data. The Gartner analyst firm found growth in application infrastructure services (which includes backup and recovery) to already be in the $1.2 billion range for 2012 and which it anticipates tripling in size between 2011 and 2016.
These various trends indicate that the cloud is no longer optional or should only be considered by organizations that are willing to put their business at risk. Rather the cloud is becoming an integral component that companies must effectively leverage if they are to compete in the 21st century.
As this transition occurs, organizations are looking for ways to introduce cloud into their day-to-day IT processes without putting their core business processes at risk. As such, many view backup and recovery server as a logical jumping off point to implement the cloud though it is equally unclear to them how to get from the local backups that they do today to taking advantage of the cloud.
Obstacles Precluding Cloud Backup Adoption
Despite the forecasted growth for the cloud in general, businesses wanting to store backup data in the cloud face a much more practical challenge: How to transition from its existing practices of storing backup data locally to storing it in the cloud in the future?
Two concerns in particular give businesses pause about using cloud backup.
- “Seeding” the cloud. The amount of corporate data that changes and needs to be protected daily is minimal – maybe 1-2% of their total amount of production data. That is part of the appeal of doing cloud backup since most small and midsized organizations can easily send these incremental amounts of backup data to the cloud over their WAN link on a nightly basis.
The larger concern is doing the first initial move – or “seeding” of the cloud – with their existing backup data. Unless an organization only has a small amount of data (a few hundred GBs or less,) the time it takes to move all of the data associated with the first cloud backup may be huge. Making this situation worse, it can be very difficult to predict exactly how long it will take to move as variables such as the amount of data and network bandwidth come into play. As the following chart illustrates, it may take hours, days, weeks or months to complete the movement of all of this data.
Source: WD
Source: WD- Recovering data from the cloud. The same principles apply when recovering data from the cloud. While quickly doing file level and even volume levels recoveries from the cloud may be feasible, expeditiously completing large application recoveries (in a few hours) or entire site recoveries (within 24 hours) may be at best problematic and at worst impossible.
WD Arkeia: Intelligent Hybrid Backup
It is for these two reasons that a hybrid approach to backup is an ideal way to take advantage of the best of what both local and cloud-based backup have to offer. Using local backup, companies may more quickly complete backups of their environment to onsite, physical media and them move this data offsite. Further, by storing backups on removable media such as disk or tape, companies may move large amounts of data to or recover it from a remote site without going through WAN links.
The key here is to use a backup solution that intelligently implements both local and cloud backup, or hybrid backup. While a number of backup products support hybrid backup, they do not manage the local and cloud backup targets very well, if at all. In this respect,WD’s network backup solution, WD® Arkeia®, differentiates itself by making hybrid backup’s implementation and ongoing management seamless.
For example, “seeding” a cloud may sound simple on the surface. However creating a good first copy of the backup data in the cloud normally takes quite a bit of planning and work to successfully complete that initiative. Further complicating the situation, incremental backups that are dependent on having a good copy of data in the cloud may put on hold until the cloud is seeded.
WD® Arkeia® removes these concerns about hybrid backup’s initial implementation. It first creates a full initial copy of the backup data on local media and then uses that copy of data to “seed” the cloud. This technique eliminates the need for organizations to wait until the cloud seeding is done before other backups may occur.
To prevent the possibility of data loss during this cloud seeding period, even as the data needed to seed the cloud is in transit, WD® Arkeia® can run incremental backups in the background, deduplicate it and then replicate it to the cloud even if the cloud is not yet seeded. However once the cloud is seeded, WD® Arkeia® re-syncs the data that was sent on removable media with the data that was replicated so all data remains consistent. In this way organizations may take their time in seeding the cloud without having to worry about gaps in their data protection.
They also do not need to concern themselves about the integrity of their data regardless of how they choose to move it (removable media or replication.) If doing cloud seeding with removable media, WD® Arkeia® may optionally encrypt data before then it is placed on the removable media. Then once it arrives at its destination, regardless of the order in which the media arrives WD® Arkeia® can re-assemble it.
Alternatively if replicating the data over a WAN link, WD® Arkeia® encrypts the backup data, control data and metada using AES-256 encrytion to ensure it securely and safely arrives at the intended destination.
Thes same principles that WD® Arkeia® uses to seed the cloud also hold true when doing recoveries. While organizations would probably opt to recover files or even volumes from the cloud over the WAN, when doing large ap
plication or disaster recoveries, they could again place the data on removable media (disk or tape,) send it to the recovery site and then do the restore.
WD Arkeia: Hybrid Backup without the Backup Headaches
Using the cloud as part of an organization’s overall backup and recovery plan is now within reach for almost any size organization. However just because the cloud is readily available as a backup target does not mean all backup software solutions are equally well suited to take advantage of the cloud as a backup target and seamlessly roll it into their backup processes.
WD provides an ideal way for organizations to incorporate the cloud into their daily backup processes without having to re-engineer them. By accommodating both local and cloud-based backup and integrating them into one simple to implement and manage hybrid backup process, organizations no longer have to choose between “local” or “cloud” when doing backup. Instead WD® Arkeia® gives them the best of what both local and cloud-based backup have to offer without the headaches of either.