Tag Archive for Backup

The Evolution of Backup

The Evolution of BackupHave you ever stopped to think about how the technology for data protection has evolved? Backup has been around, in one form or another, since 3000 B.C. It has evolved and adapted to take advantage of improvements in technology platforms. Storage vendor Axcient traces the evolution of backup technology from clay tablets to the cloud in this infographic.

Axcient traces the evolution of backup and key events in backup methods.

Axcient infographic the evolution of backup

According to CrunchBaseAxcient is an entirely new type of cloud platform. Their technology stack eliminates data loss, keeps applications up and running, and makes sure that IT infrastructures never go down.

Axcient is designed for today’s always-on business, The system replaces legacy backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery software and hardware. They claim it reduces the amount of expensive copy data in an organization by as much as 80%.

By mirroring an entire business in the cloud, Axcient makes it simple to access and restore data from any device. They claim that with a single click their app can configure failover systems, and virtualize your entire office – all from a single deduplicated copy.

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The key to any successful Business Continuity Plan is a solid, verified backup plan. The impact of a major data loss on a SMB can be devastating. The actual numbers are debatable, however, it seems that a significant number of firms go out of business after a major data loss. 

There are many new ways to backup your data, from Acronis, Axcient, Barracuda (CUDA), EMC (EMC), ExagridHP (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Symantec (SYMC), Veem what is important is that you have a plan, execute it and test it. 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Top Five IT Trends for 2013

Top five IT trends for 2013Ian Kilpatrick, who has the longest job title I have ever seen, chairman of international value added distributor, specialists in market development for secure IP infrastructure solutions and convergence at Wick Hill Group shares his vision of the top five IT trends for 2013. In the article, Top five IT trends for 2013 at ITnewslink he shares his predictions.

BYOD Man1. BYOD – He says the first IT Trend for 2013 is BYOD. BYOD is now an unstoppable, user-driven wave that will continue to make a major impact on the IT world in 2013 and beyond.  2013 will see companies trying to integrate BYOD into their networks.

He also speculates that we can expect to see the growth of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows to Go secure USB sticks based on Windows 8, which provide remote users with the supported version of the corporate desktop. These are available from a limited number of suppliers authorized by Microsoft and include Imation’s IronKey Workspace for Windows to Go.

Mobile Device Management2. Mobile Device Management – The next IT trend for 2013 is that Mobile Device Management solutions growth will accelerate in 2013. The growth is due to the rapid growth of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but particularly smartphones.

Growth will be strongest for MDM solutions that offer features such as ensuring mobile device usage complies with company security policies, allocating access rights, managing configuration, updating policies, dealing with data leakage issues, and dealing with lost or stolen devices.

A crucial component for the continued growth of MDM solutions will be the clear separation between the management of business and personal data on devices. There are over 100 suppliers in mobile device management many of them are good but niche solutions. The Gartner (IT) Magic Quadrant identifies the strategic leaders, which includes Zenprise.

High density wireless3. High density wireless – Wireless requirements have been significantly incrementing over the last year making it the third IT trend for 2013. The firm says BYOD has changed both the data transfer and performance expectations of users. However, these expectations have not been met, with many networks still inadequate in their coverage and performance.

The new 802.11ac standard, with 1 gigabit per second throughput rates, will be a key driver in organizations moving to high-density wireless in 2013. High density wireless will provide companies with high coverage and high performance, supporting business-critical applications and delivering complete site coverage There will continue to be a shift from niche solutions towards more strategic solutions. The Gartner Magic Quadrant identifies Xirrus, which will continue to experience stratospheric growth.

Data back-up and recovery4. Data back-up and recovery – 2013’s fourth IT trend for 2013 deals with data back-up and recovery. Organizations have been under immense pressure from ever-increasing data volumes, archiving, and compliance requirements.

At the top end, new data replication technologies will have a major impact on data centers in 2013. For smaller organizations, the shift from tape will continue apace. For conservative organizations, the move to disc (and, in particular, RDX technologies that combine the best of tape and disk) will accelerate. Hybrid back-up to RDX and then the cloud will increase. In volume terms, the lowest move (but in market-hype the biggest) will be significant growth in direct back-up to the cloud. RDX, hybrid, and cloud data backup solutions are available from vendors such as Imation and Barracuda Networks.

Data leakage protection5. Data leakage protection – The last Wick Hill Group IT trend for 2013 says that with the growing volumes of data and regulatory bodies’ willingness to levy fines for non-compliance, data leakage protection will continue to be a major cause for concern during 2013. Companies will be looking closely at how to secure and manage their data as their network boundaries spread even wider, with increased use of social networking and BYOD, increased remote access, the rapid growth of wireless, increased virtualization, and the move towards convergence.

Increasingly, organizations will couple DLP products with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions. DLP concerns will also continue the growth curve for authentication (much of it hosted in the cloud) and encryption, to protect data, both in motion and at rest. Some companies will look to hosted security services and the cloud to cope with an increasingly complex security situation. SIEM and authentication solutions are available from companies such as LogLogic, Check Point VASCO, and SafeNet.

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So these are not really earth-shattering predictions for 2013, BYOD, MDM, and Wi-Fi are already part of my world. We are doubling our backup capabilities and will be updating from our current McAfee to some sort of DLP

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Mix Tape – The Future of Big Data Storage

Mix Tapes - The Future of Big Data StorageThe mix tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way according to New Scientist. From the updates posted by Facebook’s (FB) 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organization worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need to store massive amounts of data is greater than ever. Hard drives have been the workhorse of large storage operations for decades. However, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives is set to the replace the HDD. The new tape drives pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy in the size of a 1980’s mix tape, according to the article.

Researchers at Fuji Film (4901) and IBM (IBM) have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data. The cartridge which measures 10 centimeters by 10 cm by 2 cm, can store  about 35 million books’ worth of information. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated with nanoparticles of barium ferrite. The coating stabilizes magnetic storage media by keeping moisture and oxidation (rust) from damaging the surface of storage tape.

But the real début for this technology, the author speculates will be with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when it is completed in 2024. SKA will consist of thousands of antennas across the southern hemisphere. Once it’s up and running, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day. If the SKA data archive was built using today’s 3-terabyte HDD’s, the telescope would fill an unmanageable 120,000 drives a year.

Data recovery100 terabytes on a cartridge

That annual archive growth would swamp an experiment that is expected to last decades, says IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou, who is part of a team working to build tapes for the SKA. The IBMer says that by the time the telescope comes online, they  expect to be able to store 100 terabytes. They plan to store that much data by shrinking the width of the recording tracks and using more accurate systems for positioning the read-write heads used to access them.

Using tapes should cut down drastically on energy use, too. A 2010 study by Clipper Group found that data centers with disc drive arrays use over 200 times more power than would a tape library of similar size. Disc drives in large arrays tend to stay powered-up, so their platters spin continuously, in case data is required, says Jon Hiles of Spectra Logic, a digital archiving firm in Boulder, CO. But tape drives only use power when they are being read or recorded on, he says.

The downside of tapes

The downside of tapes is that they are slower to access than hard discs. Tapes have to be fetched by a robotic mechanism, inserted in a reader and spooled to the right point. But the Linear Tape File System, expedites this process to make it comparable to disc drives, Eleftheriou told the blog. As storage needs skyrocket, hard drives won’t be able to keep up and keep power down, Eleftheriou says. Density improvements in hard drives are facing physical limits that mean they can only add more power-munching platters. “It’s time to take advantage of the low power and low-cost of tape,” he says.

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It is unlikely even the largest firm will need the kind of capacity SKA’s IT staff will have to deal with every day. But it is likely that every organization that stores big data on-site will be looking for low-cost, high-capacity alternatives to disk. However I would not want to trust 35 TB (or more) of data to a cassette which can be easily destroyed. Do you think the 80’s mix tape cassettes  are the future of big data storage?

Do you think cassette tapes are the future of big data storage?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedInFacebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Batman Protects Data

Batman Protects DataBatman, the crime fighter who protects the streets of Gotham. Now he can protect your data. Mimoco has added Batman to its line of Mimobots, the USB flash drives that look, flashy.

Batman Mimobot

According to the New York Times, the USB crime fighter can hold 2 GB to 16 GB of data while sitting on your desk or plugged into your laptop. The Batman Mimobot comes with preloaded character-specific content, including wallpaper, screen savers, avatars and sound features.

Mimoco’s licensing deal with Warner Brothers includes Batman, Robin, the Joker, Catwoman, and a limited-edition Batman, clad in a vintage 1939 black-and-gray costume. Additional characters from DC Comics, including Green Lantern, Superman, and the Flash, are expected soon according to the NYT.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

LinkedIn Lacks Real-Time Backup

LinkedIn Lacks Real-Time BackupIt is always smart to have a backup plan. However, the IPO filings for social media giant LinkedIn revealed they do not have a backup plan. Mashable has a nice summary of LinkedIn’s SEC S-1 form. The business networking site does not have a backup plan. announced that it plans to raise at least $175 million in the initial public offering. According to the forms, LinkedIn earned $161.4 million in revenue from January 2010 to September 2010.

The revenue came from three products:

  • Job listings – 41%
  • Advertising – 32%
  • Premium subscriptions 27%.

Real-time backup data center

Data Center Knowledge found in the IPO was that LinkedIn does not have a real-time backup data center. The article says that a failure of the social media firms primary data center would knock its LinkedIn.com site offline.

We recently implemented a disaster recovery program, which allows us to move production to a backup data center in the event of a catastrophe. Although this program is functional, it does not yet offer a real-time backup data center, so if our primary data center shuts down, there will be a time that the website will remain shut down while the transition to the backup data center takes place” LinkedIn said on page 14 of the SEC filing. The company has key infrastructure located in San Francisco and southern California, which are both prone to earthquakes. “Despite any precautions, we may take, the occurrence of a natural disaster or other unanticipated problems at our hosting facilities could result in lengthy interruptions in our services,” the company said.

The social media site has taken steps to protect its user data. Data Center Knowledge reported that LinkedIn was deploying a business continuity program in an Equinix (EQIX) data center in Chicago. The company said it already housed equipment in Equinix data centers in California. In December 2010, LinkedIn opened a new data center in Los Angeles, saying that the expansion would give “an additional, more robust data center that not only helps us handle the increasing traffic load on our servers, but to also provide more redundancy in case of an emergency.

Data Center Knowledge summarizes that LinkedIn has its backup data stored in a remote data center using a “cold ” or “warm” backup configuration. These approaches don’t provide an instant rollover in the event of a major downtime event but allow a site owner to redeploy the site from the most recent backup. Servers in the backup data center are typically configured with the required software and applications, so they’re ready to be deployed as needed. LinkedIn didn’t indicate how long it might be offline in the event of a data center failure.

Multiple data centers

The Data Center Knowledge article points out that larger Internet companies like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), and Facebook have multiple data centers and can use their network to quickly shift workloads between different facilities. LinkedIn’s infrastructure has not yet reached that scale. The article suggests that  LinkedIn has not arranged for a real-time backup set up because of the challenges it presents for database-driven sites.  The article uses Facebook’s experience when the social networker added its first East Coast data center in Virginia. The Facebook engineering team found that setting up a second site serving real-time data created “two main application-level challenges: cache consistency and traffic routing,” according to a blog entry by Facebook’s Jason Sobel.

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I have been on LinkedIn for quite a while and never gave their DRP a second thought. Maybe because I didn’t need the job networking connections until recently. Seems to me that if LinkedIn wants to compete with social media favorite Facebook, and grow the paid portions of the site, they need to have 24x7x365 availability. Hopefully, that is in the development pipeline after they raise their $175 million in the IPO.

Is a real-time backup data center a must have for LinkedIn to continue to grow?

Have you had real success with landing your next gig with LinkedIn? Facebook?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.