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Building practical data protection strategies.

Article Excerpt
In 1952, the world's first successful tape drive was delivered, the IBM 726 with 12,500 bytes of capacity per reel. In 1956 the world's first disk drive was delivered, the Ramac 350 with 5 megabytes of capacity. Though no one knew it at the time, two key events in the storage industry had occurred; 1) the storage hierarchy was created with online and offline storage and 2) the first storage management applications were born, namely backup and recovery. Backup and recovery would become the primary storage management application for the next 50 years as protecting data became increasingly important. Will this traditional application survive the increasing demands for ultra-high availability and the need for nearly instantaneous recovery?

Data protection has become the most critical piece of most IT strategies today. There are four fundamental stages in the lifecycle of digital data: 1) data creation 2) data access 3) data archive and 4) data deletion/destruction. The deletion/destruction phase no longer applies to all data types as considerable amounts of data is being stored indefinitely if not forever for a variety of reasons. The overarching goal of data protection is to protect information that cannot be easily replaced or replaced at all throughout it meaningful lifecycle.

Different levels of data protection exist and as expected, higher levels of data protection cost more to implement. If the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of hardware devices would have been 100% during the early years of the IT industry, businesses would have only needed to engage in straight forward backup and recovery processes. Software errors, human errors, natural disasters, the increasing number of power failures, building damages, and destructive intrusion such as worms and viruses have turned data protection into a complex process. Better data protection and security have evolved over the years from simply improving the MTBF of devices to implementing a variety of local and remote strategies to address the numerous causes of downtime.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) -- The desired amount of...

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