New Considerations for Using Disk-based Solutions for Outsourced Data Protection

Back in March I received a call from a records management provider in the upstate New York area who was inquiring, "How do I get started in providing disk-based backup for my current clients?" This records management provider currently only stores paper and tape in his company's facilities but rightly recognizes that there is a growing trend towards disk-based backup and did not want to be left out in the cold. But he was wondering what options were available in the market that he could offer his prospective clients.

In talking to this individual, he first described what he had done so far to enter this space as well as some of his concerns. He said he was already looking at a backup software solution that would deduplicate and replicate the data to his site. However his concerns with using this backup software were two-fold. First, he had to convince his clients to swap out their current backup software with his backup software; and, two, he figured he would need someone at least part-time if not full-time to manage this part of his operations.

Since backup to disk would be new ground for his company, he did not have a lot of technical expertise on-hand and it would require him to hire someone to support this initiative. So this meant he was looking at a fairly significant investment even apart from the purchase of the technology. Then even if he made the jump, he was not sure he wanted to support his backup software in these environments should problems arise.

These concerns were all understandable so I probed a little deeper and asked what he preferred to do and what technical expertise he had. He explained that he would prefer to just install a disk solution at the customer site and then replicate that backup data back to his facility. This way he would be pretty much out of the day-to-day hassles of trying to troubleshoot backup problems or making sure that the backup software worked with specific applications. He could instead leave that to his client's IT staff.

I then told him about some of the different disk-based appliances options in the market and he perked up when I told him about some of the features of the Quantum DXi series. It turns out this individual had some background in IT and was familiar with terms like partitioning and virtualization. In fact, he noted that many of the technologies that he saw coming back to the forefront today were technologies that he had worked with in the past but were now coming back in vogue again.

Here are some of the specific features of the DXi Series that he found of specific interest for his environment:

• Leverages deduplication to reduce bandwidth requirements. Without deduplication it is extremely unlikely that replication will work over a WAN, especially considering the large amount of backup data that he would need to move. Since Quantum's solutions first deduplicate data and then check to see if a block of data exists at the target site before sending it, it would minimize the size of the WAN links he would need between his site and his clients' sites and can typically reduce bandwidth requirements by 98% or more.
• Different size disk-based appliances with upgrade paths. He found this feature appealing since he could put right-size the appliance according to his customer's infrastructure and budget. Then as his or his customers' backup data stores grew, Quantum provides an upgrade path for them to larger solutions.
• Both NAS and VTL options. He is not sure what network interface requirements his prospective customers might have. Since the DXi Series offers both NAS and VTL interfaces, it took that concern off the table.
• No need to hire someone. This individual wanted a fairly low maintenance approach to offering disk-based backup without the need to hire someone. Since he did have some IT expertise, he could do some work initially and on an ongoing basis. The DXi series could allow him to offer this service without increasing his staffing levels.
• A scalable solution that could partition his customer's data. This feature really appealed to him. The DXi series would allow him to install the appropriate size appliance at his client sites but a larger, more scalable solution at his facility. In this way, he would only need to put one DXi7500 at his site and then, using its partitioning feature, keep the data replicated from each client's site on separate logical partitions but he could still keep all of client's data on the same physical box. Further, he could leverage the DXi7500's deduplicating capabilities to deduplicate data from all his clients across the entire DXi7500 since the DXi7500 could globally deduplicates data across all of the partitions or shares of his different clients.
• It supports both disk and tape. This feature he really liked because getting the initial copy of backup data from his client site to his site could be problematic using only replication and a network connection - especially if there was a large amount of data to move. Using the DXi7500, he could receive existing customer tapes and import the data into the DXi7500. This solves the problem of the initial data move of the data from the customer site to his site and then he only needs enough bandwidth to receive the smaller amount of data that is transmitted on a daily basis. Further, if his customer did have a disaster and needed to recover the data, he could easily export the customer data back to tape and send it to them to recover.

By the end of the call, this individual requested that I put him in touch with Quantum so he could do a deeper dive with the Quantum team to see whether or not the DXi solution would work in his environment. However, the concerns this individual raised regarding the use of backup software were ones I had not previously considered from either a support or implementation perspective. In these environments with providers with these types of concerns, one can certainly understand why some providers would only want to use disk-based backup solutions such as Quantum's DXi Series as their preferred solution.