Spectra Logic T50e

By Jack Fegreus
published: Tuesday, August 25 2009

Reducing Risk in a Virtual Infrastructure via Lifecycle Management for Backup Media

Government regulations continue to expand into risk management with mandates requiring corporate officers to safeguard business data for many years beyond the traditional 7-year standard period. Spectra Logic is uniquely incorporating into their tape libraries dramatic advances in data protection, including encryption key management, media lifecycle management, and automated initiation of SpectraGuard Support that go far beyond incremental innovations in tape density and performance.

For IT, the path to higher efficiency in turbulent economic times starts with consolidating resource management and optimizing resource utilization. In this process, many CIOs are discovering that they need to change the way IT views and classifies data. Once these changes in the perception of information and data are understood, the hype over the displacement of tape by disk crumbles like an Alka-Seltzer tablet under Niagara Falls.

Tactically, this realignment has a natural affinity with the adoption of IT Service Management (ITSM) and the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which put application-centric requirements on IT devices. ITSM builds upon classic quality-control (QC) practices for process management and focuses on the standardization and automation of administrator tasks to achieve better operating cost control and improve productivity.

For data protection applications, streaming throughput for reads and writes is the commanding metric. Moreover, for cost-effective I/O streaming, especially when writing data, tape is nonpareil. As a result, IT organizations need to take full advantage of a multiple-tier storage infrastructure. What's more, taking advantage of storage infrastructure in an ITSM context requires significant automation and that makes a device such as the Spectra T50e a perfect fit for the next-generation SMB data center.

IT must also reassess its historical view of data as an external resource that must be stored and valued only by the cost of storage. To align with business, IT must take a lifecycle management approach that views data as an internal asset that changes in value as processes-both end-user and IT-act upon it. Fueling the urgency of this reassessment, government regulations continue to expand into risk management with mandates requiring corporate officers to safeguard business data for many years beyond the 7-year period that has been the de facto standard for retention within traditional IT backup schemes.

For IT, these new government regulations along with technology advances, such as the multidimensional analysis associated with a data warehouse, are driving the growth of a new class of static reference data and leading to the convergence of backup and disaster recovery technologies into a unified data protection regime. When those trends intersect with the growth of server virtualization, it creates a maelstrom of Homeric proportions as the risk of a single VOE server failing cascades down to multiple virtual machines (VMs) running multiple critical applications. As a result, CIOs need to rethink how data is used, secured and managed, rather than just how data is stored.

Innovations in tape density and performance continue to ensure that tape plays a vital role in an information lifecycle management hierarchy. Nonetheless, meeting information lifecycle management constructs requires complimentary advances in automated tape management to keep operating costs in check. Spectra Logic uniquely meets those needs by directly incorporating into their tape libraries dramatic advances in data protection, including encryption key management, media lifecycle management, and automated initiation of SpectraGuard Support.

As the volume of data falling under the scrutiny of regulatory demands grows, IT must also introduce its own innovations to ensure that demonstrable recovery procedures are in place. IT innovations, however, often come in the form of a two-edged sword. One such innovation is server virtualization and the growing adoption of a Virtual Operating Environment (VOE).

Of particular importance is the growing practice of IT to use multiple VMs in order to establish the RAS equivalent of a large data center. That practice of utilizing multiple VMs, each of which is dedicated to running a particular application, makes the total amount of data stored within a VOE quite prodigious. More importantly, in a normal backup scheme, that data will grow by a factor of 25-to-1 within a backup archive using a traditional grandfather-father-son backup scheme. That's over 16 LTO-4 tape cartridges for every TB of active on-line data. As a result, a VOE the perfect microcosm for examining all factors that impact backup load processing, including data retention requirements and the nature of the data in terms of compressibility and redundancy.