Introduction to Backup and Recovery Services
Is This for You? The document set is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals who are responsible for the planning, design, deployment, and operations of backup and recovery solutions in the enterprise, corporate or branch office environments. The readers of this document set are expected to have an understanding of its technical details; however, service-level expertise is not needed to follow the enterprise-level discussions and to understand the decisions that are made.
On This Page
 | Introduction |
| Blueprint |
| Planning Guide |
| Build Guide |
| Operations Guide |
Introduction
Organizational applications can generate large amounts of electronic data, and the trend is towards a continued increase in data storage requirements. Organizations need to find ways to protect their data in the most effective manner without affecting the services provided by their data centers. Moreover, data retention, archiving, and vaulting requirements introduce new backup challenges because they often exceed the capabilities of conventional backup and recovery technologies. The data protection issue is further compounded by the move toward geographically dispersed data centers and the demand for uninterrupted application availability with little (if any) downtime allocated for backup. An organization’s dependence on full-time availability of data calls for frequent backups to ensure protection of mission-critical data. These seemingly irreconcilable requirements place enormous pressure on IT departments of organizations; they must find ways to increase the speed of backups and at the same time reduce the degree to which backup procedures interfere with business-critical services provided by the data centers on a day-to-day basis. Equally important is the need to recover data quickly and efficiently. The design of backup and recovery solutions needs to take into account business requirements of the organization as well as its operational environment. The backup and recovery solutions that are deployed must be predictable, reliable, and capable of processing data as quickly as possible. Challenges that are faced by organizations in managing data include:
| • | Ensuring 99.999 percent service availability. |
| • | Managing growth in the volumes of data. |
| • | Managing storage infrastructure to improve the quality of service (QoS) as defined by service level agreements (SLAs) while reducing complexity and controlling costs. |
| • | Integrating applications with storage and data management requirements. |
| • | Operating within short, or non-existent, data backup windows. |
| • | Supporting existing IT systems that cannot run the latest technologies. |
| • | Managing islands of technology leads to decentralized administration and management as well as increased costs. |
| • | Assessing data value so that the most appropriate strategies can be applied to each type of data. |
Backup and recovery technologies provide a cornerstone of data protection strategies that help organizations meet their requirements for data availability and accessibility. Data centers can use redundant components and fault tolerance technologies (such as server clustering, software mirroring, or hardware mirroring) to replicate crucial data for ensuring high availability. However, these technologies alone cannot solve issues caused by data corruption or deletion, which can occur due to application bugs, viruses, security breaches, or user errors. There may also be a requirement for retaining information in an archived form, such as for industry or legal auditing reasons; this requirement may extend to transactional data, documents, and collaborative information such as e-mail. Therefore, it is necessary to have a data protection strategy that includes a comprehensive backup and recovery scheme to protect data from any kind of unplanned outage or disaster or to meet industry requirements for data retention.
Blueprint
This blueprint provided detailed guidance on planning and creating a reliable and effective backup and recovery solution for an enterprise-class organization to meet its business needs. The key points presented in the blueprint were used by the design team to create the WSSRA backup and recovery solution used in our scenario implementations. For specific details of this backup and recovery design, refer to the Backup and Recovery Services Planning Guide.
Planning Guide
This guide provided an approach for efficiently designing and managing a backup and recovery infrastructure using a Galaxy-based backup and recovery system for the CDC scenario. A breakdown of the choices made in the WSSRA backup and recovery design process was provided, along with the reasons for making the design choices. This guide also showed how the design process for different components of the CDC scenario took into account the unique requirements of different types of data.
Build Guide
Backup and recovery services are essential components of the CDC infrastructure. The SAN and backup systems must be configured correctly for the data center to meet WSSRA standards for availability, security, and performance. An improper fiber network or storage layout could cause security, scalability, and performance issues. Although the CDC infrastructure has built-in redundant components, improper configuration of the hardware components and management systems could lead to reduced availability. It is essential to work closely with the SAN and backup/restore vendor personnel to properly plan and configure the SAN and backup/restore components. The testing methodologies and the actual processes of testing the backup and recovery services in the WSSRA configuration were provided in this guide, and test case specifications and results were also discussed. With the exception of a minor bug (refer to the earlier "Functional Test Results" section), all the bugs found were resolved and testing went as expected.
Operations Guide
This guide helps the readers understand the extent of operations guidance that is available for the backup and recovery services discussed in WSSRA. This guidance has been tested in a WSSRA environment and the project team deferred to this guidance as the authoritative source of operations content.