By Bill Andrews, President and CEO, ExaGrid
Many IT professionals spend a great deal of time deciding which backup application to use to protect their data, however the same level of time is not often spent on choosing the correct backup storage for their environment.
The storage chosen can impact backup performance which impacts the length of the backup window, restore times which impact user productivity, security to ensure the data is safe for restores after cyber attacks or site disasters, as well as many other important factors that keep an organization’s data protected.
Here are the key considerations to make when choosing backup storage:
Ingest Performance
Organizations that simply use primary storage as a backup target or that back up data to deduplication appliances often experience slow backups that create a long backup window which impacts end user productivity. The challenge of slow ingest isn’t caused by the storage, but the actual file system and software. There is a belief that SSD will solve ingest problems but that is not true if the SSD hits all the bottlenecks listed below.
The following should be considered:
- Is the backup storage optimized for NAS files or transaction files, or is it specifically optimized for large backup job files?
- Is the encryption at rest performed in the software (which is slower) or at the hardware level by the disk drives (which occurs in nanoseconds)?
- Can job concurrency be employed to send and ingest backup jobs in parallel?
- Are any advanced protocols being used to improve backup speed? Some protocols are 20% to 30% faster than standard CIFS and NFS protocols.
- Is there any inline deduplication occurring before the data is written to the disk? This can greatly slow the backups down, even if software is added to the media server to try and avert the performance impact.
- Are there any integrations with the chosen backup application that allow for front end-load balancing for performance?
Restore Performance
There are many bottlenecks to restoring data that need to be considered:
- Is the data stored in a deduplicated format? If so, it needs to be rehydrated for each restore request which slows restore speed.
- Is there any use of advanced protocols specifically for backup?
- Are there any techniques to reconstitute fulls on the backup storage so they are ready for restore?
- Is there any use of fast clone technology to improve restore performance?
- Is there any feature to allow for restores in parallel?
Backup Window Length
Organizations need a short backup window in order to complete backups before users begin work in the morning. They also need backup windows to stay fixed-length and not keep growing as data grows.
What needs to be considered to keep backup windows short?
- Does the storage have true a scale-out architecture where all resources (processor, memory, networking) and storage can be added?
- When the system needs to expand due to data growth, is compute added with more storage? If only storage is added without processor, memory or networking resources, then the backup window will grow as data grows.
When Disaster Strikes
What about business continuity to keep IT operational after a cyber attack or a site disaster such as fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake?
##
Read Part 2 of this series: Backup Requirements for Business Continuity to learn more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill has spent over 19 years growing ExaGrid from a concept to a visionary player in backup storage. With over 30 years of IT data center infrastructure experience, Bill has proven success in technical sales and marketing. Bill has impacted numerous high-growth companies, including Pedestal Software, eDial, Adero, Live Vault, Microcom and Bitstream. Bill is a graduate of Fitchburg State College and holds a BS in Industrial Technology. When Bill is not working, he enjoys boating, playing guitar, and songwriting.
