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Traditional backup systems, commonplace in many companies, do not offer the level of protection required to maintain access to key financial data and the professional productivity of finance departments. Ian Masters, sales director at Double-Take Software, explores the reasons why business continuity planners needs to evaluate the importance of individual systems and use systems that provide an appropriate level of protection.

The overall business continuity plans of many companies often consists of a hurried fix of a failed server with reinstatement of the company’s data from a tape backup made at the end of the previous day’s work. This may be adequate for some data in some departments but the average finance department is completely reliant on the availability of the organisation’s financial data and the applications with which they work. If the IT systems providing these fail, there is very little that finance staff will be able to effectively achieve. Productivity of the finance team, and through them the financial stability of the entire organisation, can only be maintained by guaranteeing uptime of the IT systems used in the execution of their work.

Consider a company utilising traditional business continuity planning across their entire IT infrastructure, with data backed up to tape sometime after the end of each working day. If a production server goes down in the middle of the following day the finance department, inline with the rest of the company, will typically experience half a day of data loss and a further day of downtime whilst the server is repaired and data reinstated. The total productivity loss can be measured by calculating the cost of the manpower needed to replicate lost work and the idle hours, whilst systems are rebuilt, in which users cannot access their data or applications and therefore add further productivity. Within finance departments this is likely to be a high figure, given their reliance on IT systems.

The above recovery scenario is useful as an example of one of the main problems associated with recovery from tape. However, significant further complications arise when considering the provision of business continuity for global or decentralised finance departments, with staff operating across time zones and locations.

The very act of backing up servers to tape takes time and consumes limited IT resources. While a server is being backed up, it uses high levels of CPU and I/O, resulting in an overall slower performance. Network usage increases as files go from production servers to the backup platform, slowing down user traffic. Additionally, if the backup window is within working hours of one of a company’s global locations, open files and applications, locked by users, will not be protected. Typically, global organisations are forced to perform tape backups at the central data centre between 2:00am and 6:00am GMT to avoid these problems. This is not a very long window to backup to tape as it is a relatively slow process and prone to errors leading to the need for manual intervention.

Protecting the data of branch office sites is also problematic, with companies often utilising non-IT staff to undertake the tape backup before manually transporting the media to the disaster recovery site. This process increases the possibility of data loss through human error or tapes damaged in transit.

IT systems will inevitably fail at some point. The data and applications used by finance departments are mission-critical to an organisation so must be protected more thoroughly than traditional methods allow. If money can be invested in back-up and recovery technologies that surpass the capabilities of traditional tape backup continuity planning, and therefore mitigate current losses and any future losses during the time the business continuity technology is in place, there is the potential for a huge return on investment even for the smallest company. This takes us from a nightly tape process and into the realm of continuous data protection or real-time replication.

With real-time data replication systems, as data is changed by the users it is transmitted from production servers to redundant servers at the same or alternate sites. Instead of having data backed up only up to the end of the previous working day, data replicated on the redundant server is a virtual twin of that on the production server. If the production server fails, it can be a relatively simple task to failover to the redundant server and allow users to continue their work without interruption.

If data residing throughout the company’s infrastructure is replicated to a central data centre or HQ they can implement a centralised backup policy. By centralising file backup, replication software reduces IT administration costs and eliminates the need for backup hardware and software on remote sites. Instead of each site handling its own tape backups (changing tapes, cleaning cartridges, monitoring jobs, and physical transportations of backup copies of mission critical data to the disaster recovery site), all data on the company’s production servers have a consistent copy at a core data facility and a centralised IT team can perform backups from the replicated copy of data.

Data can be replicated from remote branches to a data centre anywhere in the world, and then again to an alternative data centre, to allow for disaster recovery between geographies, maximise data protection and the overall resilience of branch offices and remote sites.

Replication software also avoids the problems associated with workers accessing files across time zones, leaving them locked and unavailable for backup. By providing a second copy, the data is not locked, so there are no open files, and CPU and I/O issues become irrelevant as users are running from the production platform and are therefore unaffected. Additionally, because replication provides a second real-time copy by continually sending small updates, the backup platform already has access to the files without reaching across the network server to the production servers.

Allowing IT administrators to create point-in-time shapshots, a built-in feature of Windows 2003 called Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), is one of the most significant enhancements to data protection beyond tape backup. Snapshots can be taken at any time, even if files are still open and configured automatically at intervals up to every two hours. This process is invisible to the user organisation but provides it with the capability to restore a file to a previous version of its own, without the need to restore from tape. Used together, snapshots and replication might allow for upwards of 90 days of online recovery.

There are various ways in which replication software can recover individual files lost from the source server. It can be configured to ‘burst’ the changes on the target server providing a redundant copy to quickly restore from. Alternatively, tape or disk shapshots can be configured to protect the files on the target server even while the production files are in use. In this instance, one can go to a shapshot or a differential tape and recover the file without impacting the production of current users. Restoring the file directly to the production server will provide immediate access to the recovered file and replicate back to the target server to provide consistency for all copies.

In the event of an entire data volume or disk set being damaged, the capabilities of replication software can be put in reverse, pushing data from the target server back to the production server. Once the production server is repaired, replication technology will restore files back to their original home. The relevancy of recovered data is also improved, as the copy of the files restored by replication software will be seconds away from what the production had at the moment of failure.

Guarding mission-critical data in a global, round-the-clock business environment is challenging organisations worldwide. Most finance functions have significant uptime requirements and data dependencies and traditional methods of data protection simply do not provide the level of uptime required. IDC recently reported a 15.2 per cent growth of the storage replication market, demonstrating that organisations are increasingly using replication technologies to enhance existing software and hardware and provide a better backup. Data replication technology may be the solution that addresses an organisation’s critical need to protect its financial data, its productivity and therefore its ongoing success.

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