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Branching Out
Ian Masters, sales director of Sunbelt System Software looks at how to reduce the costs and risks of branch office data protection...
Most organisations understand the importance of deploying the right resources, processes and technology to protect key information and minimise downtime at their main headquarters. But too many companies don’t have the adequate resources or technology in place for protecting invaluable data in branch or remote offices. Their data protection strategies do not encompass the fact that branch offices now contain customer databases, e-mail servers or financial information that are critical to the company’s day-to-day operations.
The traditional approach – relying on tape backup for branch office data protection – is costly and risky. In addition to the initial tape backup hardware, software and installation costs for each branch, there are continual costs of tape media, maintenance and off-site transport and storage. Most companies can’t afford to have IT staff in branch offices, so they incur traditional IT support costs for weekly maintenance and verification of branch backups. Even with weekly support, central IT ends up finding out about gaps in the branch data backup after important information has already been lost.
Often, untrained non-technical staff in the branches have to be responsible for consistent, reliable, backup. Given all of the things that could go wrong, this is an unrealistic responsibility. Backup fails without the branch staff even noticing. Shortcuts taken to save time unwittingly sabotage the process. Improperly labelling, rotating and removing tapes results in lost data and slow recovery. Since the branch employees have never tested the recovery process, they aren’t familiar with how to execute the recovery when a disruption occurs. So the branch is down for hours, or even days, and often requires the assistance of the central IT staff.
Seeking a better approach
What is surprising is that few companies realise that there are alternatives to this costly and risky approach to branch office data protection. Newer, proven software technologies make it possible to reliably and cost-effectively backup branch offices at the central data centre. In the past, centrally backing up remote locations was not feasible for most businesses because the solutions available were hard to manage and required costly Wide Area Network (WAN) bandwidth.
New remote backup solutions that use data replication software are dramatically easier to manage and work effectively over low bandwidth connections and long distances. With real-time data replication, file changes on branch office servers are automatically copied and transferred to a target server at a central location – using your existing network bandwidth. The replication occurs automatically, relieving branch office staff from their duties as backup administrators and giving IT staff confidence that reliable backups are occurring in the branches – without a lot of branch support calls and headaches. And because the replication is occurring constantly, the window of data loss is dramatically smaller compared to once-a-day tape backup.
Branch office data replication in action
A good example of this is the case of MidAmerica Bank who ended 2002 with 34 offices, profits and income per share that had outperformed the previous year, and further growth on the horizon. The bank’s success was even more remarkable as it was occurring at a time when the rest of the economy was receding. The bank, however, realised that the cost of tape backup was becoming exorbitant, with each branch having to spend $7-10,000 for backup hardware and software, in addition to setup time. This was as well as the ongoing costs of media, maintenance, communications, transport and storage. Yet this costly system failed to guarantee the protection of all records because tape backup is not constant, since it occurs just once daily. When failures occurred, the gap between the last backup and the failure resulted in the irretrievable loss of transactions and records.
Another problem for the MidAmerica Bank was its dependence on non-technical staff for tape management. People trained to serve customers were inexpertly changing tapes. According to Ray Zamora, vice president of network operations for MidAmerica bank: "There were always irksome questions, especially with so many branches. Did they make the tape change? Did they do it correctly? Did they install new tape or erase data?"
While relying on tape backup alone, MidAmerica Bank had to allow about one hour per branch for weekly technical maintenance and verification and with 34 branches, the support was roughly equal to the cost of a full time employee.
When the bank upgraded to a Dell EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), they re-evaluated options for protecting branch data. Armed with banks requirements for data storage and backup speed, Dell researched options and recommended the bank implement a real-time data replication software solution, using NSI Software’s Double-Take.
The bank initially implemented the Double-Take solution in 34 branch offices, backing up user data from remote sites to a central server in Illinois. Each branch office used a Dell server with RAID 5 storage that replicates to a lower cost server. This server provides local failover protection for the office and also serves as the source replicating the branch data to the centralised target server, attached to the central SAN. Because the replication software replicates and transports byte-level changes only, the average amount of data backed up every day from all branches is just 70MB. This helps the banks to achieve their goal of maximising the use of their existing bandwidth for as long as possible.
Ray Zamora continues: "Double-Take saves us about $50,000 dollars annually by eliminating the need for backup technical maintenance and assistance. We also save with the simple set up of the Double-Take solution which is less than a tenth the cost of setting up the tape drives. And there is no recurring hardware maintenance cost and no loss of employee time in supervising the backup process."
With no user intervention and no additional bandwidth required between the branch offices and the central data centre, real-time data replication gives MidAmerica Bank a backup and recovery solution without bottlenecks, allowing operations to continue unimpeded. The result: cost-effective quality service, up-to-the-minute data protection and economical use of existing bandwidth.
Summing up, therefore, it would appear that continuous access to key business information is a critical requirement for both corporate headquarters and branch locations. But many companies have not adjusted to this reality, and continue to reply on tape backup to protect their branch offices. The tape backup and recovery processes are complex, labour intensive and prone to errors – especially when untrained branch employees are asked to execute them. In short, tape backup for branches is a costly and risky data protection strategy. New solutions that use real-time data replication software to automatically backup branch office data to a central server provide a simpler, more reliable and cost-effective way to protect your branch offices.
