Originating Author: Fred Moore
SaskEnergy is a corporation controlled by the Saskatchewan government, which delivers natural gas to more than 90% of the province and more than 327,000 customers. The SaskEnergy case study presented on the Wiki Peer Incite Review of Oct. 7, 2008 reinforces the need to develop a recipe for your backup and recovery strategy rather than using a standardized template. It’s no surprise that many users continue to single out backup and recovery as their biggest storage management problem. Backup and recovery is a set of processes and integrated technologies that meet the requirement to manage data recovery and to ensure a speedy resumption of IT services. The continually changing need for IT and users to understand the business value of the IT function mandates a best practices approach when performing appropriate business value and criticality assessments. These practices include:
- Data classification - define application and user requirements, required data retention periods, RTO/RPOs, archival strategy to determine the overall risk profile. Most effective storage management practices will start here.
- Remote site - determine if backup copies are needed outside the disaster impact zone.
- Tiered storage - understand where various technologies fit and evaluate the economic tradeoffs. A combination of disk and tape is the optimal solution for a backup/recovery strategy. As data retention periods grow longer, high-capacity tape becomes more cost effective and provides portability in the event of electrical outages. Tape cartridges now have capacities of 1 terabyte native or 2 terabytes compressed.
- Teamwork - encourage the stakeholders, the IT and business units, to work together to develop an effective backup and recovery management strategy that unites many related areas of the business. Bring them to the table early and often to clearly set business continuity, availability and disaster recovery goals.
- Simplify - minimize the number of backup products and touch points as SaskEnergy did by choosing TSM as the preferred tool.
- Think - make sure the recovery plan is stored with the backup data!
Implementing a sustainable backup/ recovery process has been a long-standing requirement for IT. A Storage magazine survey in May 2008 estimates that just over half of IT companies ever perform regular testing of the restoration process and 30 percent perform restoration testing once per a year or less frequently. Fifty-eight percent use a combination of tape and disk for disaster recovery. The primary responses given for not doing testing regularly include not having a disaster recovery site and not needing a disaster recovery plan. In a ComputerWorld survey on Oct. 16, 2006, nearly one-third of respondents said their backup procedures aren’t documented and the majority said their staffs aren’t well versed in the department’s backup strategies. Incredible findings given that the IT industry is more than 60 years old and that the IT is a requirement for nearly all businesses to survive.
Action Item: The SaskEnergy case study highlights that truly effective backup/recovery plans are comprehensive and cover a range of approaches that maximize the ability of an organization to recover from technology failures and natural or man-made disasters. These plans include business continuity, defining operational procedures, implementing hardware redundancy, using standard backup software, and testing the disaster recovery processes. The days of using a standardized template and simply backing everything up on a daily basis have passed. It’s now time to develop a recipe for the backup/recovery needs of your business.
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