5 Challenges of using Legacy Backup Data
You want to use modern Data Protection, but some old legacy systems hinder you to take the step.
With Spictera one can still protect old legacy systems, and at the same time modernizing the data protections in a few steps.
Complex to manage
The old legacy data protections can be difficulty to manage, as it requires specific knowledge of techniques that might be difficulty to find.
Even though trends are moving towards modernized applications and services, your security copies might still using old techniques. The Data Protections and backups might become more complicated to manage over time.
With Spictera one can easily manage the Data Protections using single panel on the IBM Spectrum Protect server, and at the same time manage the restoration and/or backup from the client using almost any technique.
Not Flexible
New trends and techniques arrives faster than the Data Protection vendors can deliver solutions. This become a problem as it slows down the development as it makes data protections an issue, where it sometimes creates workarounds like D2D2D (Disk copy to local Disk area, and later copying again to offsite location).
With Spictera one can use almost any technique to protect the system solutions, using an agentless aproach where the backup storage is mounted as a filesystem or drive-letter on the server, where one can use almost anytype of commands to protect the data.
Spictera Snapshot enables an open command based interface for applications to take consistent snapshots, which makes the solution portable to protect new applications as it arrives.
The snapshots are local, with a Disaster Recovery copy stored on the IBM Spectrum Protect server storage enables flexibility to use almost any type of storage as a fast snapshot to protect applications, with less complexity, risks, and with longer retention of snapshots.
Costly
Legacy backups are often based on periodically taking full copies of the protected systems, for example weekly full backups, and daily incremental backups.
This can be both challenging for the protected system, as well as it can be costly storing more full copies etc. The faster speed for data copying, the more impact of the protected server system. This is typically an issue especially when there are big sized databases, as one wants at least a daily copy.
It is common to add more resources, such as memory, network cards, highspeed disks and media just to complete the backups on a daily basis.
With Spictera Snapshot, one can take backups more frequently using climate smart energy efficient data protection techniques that enables "progressive incremental forever" (always incremental backups) of the protected data. The more often one take a backup, the less data to copy.
Also restoration uses less resources compared to legacy data copying, as a legacy restore has to restore from a full backup and all of its incremental backups to get to the point in time of interest compared to with Spictera Snapshot where each copy represents a view of how the system looks at that particular point in time, which means that each backup is like a "full copy", so only one backup is needed to copy back.
As Spictera Snapshot uses the built in OS snapshot functionality, where the snapshots can be mounted and used while copyback is performed in background. This reduces not only the time it take to restore the data, it also makes it possible to start database recovery at the same time as when the restoration is performed, which also shorten the point in time recovery.
Spictera Snapshot makes it possible to startup an application and access the data even though not the data has been fully copied back. This can be useful if one wants to restore single tables, single raws, single posts etc in databases etc.
After all, why waiting for all the data to be copied back, if one are interested of part of the data?
Spictera SPFS makes archiving of data simple, as one can mix and use almost any type of storage, such as Tape, CD, Cloud, NAS or Disk accessible from normal filesystem operations ("ls", "copy", "dir"..), this makes the educational cost to be low as almost everyone understands how to use a filesystem, right?
With Spictera one can have a climate smart energy efficient Green IT solution, that has lower carbone oxide pollution footprint in combination with lowering the financial spenses.
Difficult to be compliant
The business requirements and demands can be challenging to fulfill using legacy data protection, especially as the RPO (recovery point objectives; the amount of data loss to accept) requires more frequent data copies.
Even if one uses transactional data, it still might need to perform schedule based backup to offload these data.
Also the RTO (restorage time objectives) requirements or the unavailability demand to restore a system after an incident can be difficulty to fullfill as the size of systems can be large, or the techniques to protect the data requires periodic full copies.
Restore tests is also a requirement that can be complicated, as that requires staffing, extra machines, and complicated validation routines etc.
The demand for having the backup copies stored offsite, to avoid physical risk such as terrorism, flooding, fire, etc is also something that can be of a challenge, especially with limitated network capabilities.
The data protection requirements also involves air-gaped protections, where the day-to-day online storage data should be separated from the offsite backup copies, and sometimes also encryped using private encryption keys.
With Spictera SPFS one can enable continuous data protection of application data, where the copies can be distributed over multiple sites, using advanced data reduction technique, with private encryption keys, and low cost storage techniques.
The Spictera continous data protection protects the data nearly immediately when it is created by integrating the SPFS solution with the databases.
All of the Spictera solutions has built in failover techniques making sure that (if configured) the data is available when needed.
Spictera Snapshot makes the restoration time to be very short (nearly instantly); as well as the data copy process using high tech backup techniques.
Not Efficient
The current legacy system is in efficient in the way how data copying is performed, as well as how to utilize the storage.
The amount of storage used for backup is much bigger compared to with Spictera solutions, where only changed content will be occupying space.
Even though one uses appliances to reduce the backup space, such as Data Domain or equivalent, it still might have to read all the data and pass this through the data reduction solution in order to detect which part are unique. This is an inefficient way of using resources as it needs more CPU, faster disks/media, network etc.
With Spictera only changed content will be copied using progressive block level incremental forever techniques (always incremental backup); where it reads the built in operating system journal to detect the changes. This reduces the amount of resources needed for copying the data, as well as the amount of data needed for the backup storage.
Replication of backup can be performed using smart replication services and WAN optimization.
What can Spectrum Protect offer?
- z/OS protection
- IBM iSeries protection
- Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, Oracle Linux) on x86_64, s390x, ppc64
- Windows
And almost any type of applications can be protected.
Isn't that flexible? climate smart solution
Can it be more simple?
