A Guide To Best Practices — The Realities Of Virtual Tape Libraries

The past few years have seen considerable changes in how and why information is stored and how it needs to be accessed. The use of disk-based backup is growing due to some very fundamental business and regulatory needs:

• Regulatory Requirements—Across the globe, the regulatory requirements from most governments have changed and are placing greater demands for data to be online and rapidly accessible. This data, outlined in a variety of regulations, must be tracked, protected, secured and accessible globally. US regulations such as SEC 17a-4, Sarbanes Oxley section 404 and HIPAA are driving the need for near-line storage strategies into every organization.
• Business Continuance—Mother Nature continues to teach us that we are not able to control everything we wish. Ensuring that business continues without interruption is a leading priority for IT organizations worldwide. This has led to an increased use of disk-based solutions to ensure business continuance, as disk backup makes recovery nearly instantaneous.
• Recovery Objectives—Data recovery is measured in two ways. First, Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is defined as how quickly IT managers can find, access and retrieve required information - it is the time by which data must be restored. Second, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is defined as the point-in-time (PIT) the IT manager needs to be able to recover - it is the point to which data must be restored.
• Application Service Level Agreements (SLA)—Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently polled IT mangers who are using disk-based backup to meet specific SLAs for key applications. 69% responded that they achieved SLAs of less than 2 hours for recovering key transactional systems such as Oracle, ERP, e-commerce and other mission critical applications.
• Information Growth—Information is growing in multiple ways. First, storage growth continues to grow from 60-100% per year, the number of files generated by computers continues to grow at an accelerated rate—causing the total amount of information in the world to double every 5 years (UC Berkeley Center for Information). Second, data that used to be discarded or archived to tape is now being kept and stored online. Third, users are using file formats that generate larger files so the same number of files requires more disk storage.