Going Tapeless (cont.)

Disk-to-Disk Protection is Now a Mainstream Technology

But that approach didn't work well for Agilent's under-the-gun software engineers. When one of them inadvertently deleted a file or needed to roll back to an earlier version of source code, IT staff had to retrieve the information from tape, which could take hours. "Engineers can't wait that long, so they'll figure out some other way to keep going-maybe even rewrite the missing code. Obviously, that's not a good use of their time," notes Dietrich. To make it worse, the restores themselves were unreliable. "Tape restores are inherently unreliable. You may have tape backups that you believe ran successfully-you may have even validated those backups and verified the tapes-but there's no guarantee that the data will be recoverable when you need it."

In addition, daily backups didn't provide enough granularity. "A full day's coding represents a great deal of value to Agilent," Dietrich explains. "It was out of the question to do tape backups during the workday-the performance hit would be too great. For all these reasons, we decided to move to a disk-to-disk system."

Agilent speeds restores-and frees IT staff time

About two years ago, Agilent's IT staff installed a NetApp NearStore R200 system as the target for disk-to-disk backups for the software engineering group. The software environment is NetApp as well: SnapVault to back up information on the NetApp FAS900 and FAS3000 storage systems, and Open Systems SnapVault for direct-attached storage.

It's paying off. "Restores are completely reliable now, and much faster," reports Dietrich. "We now take multiple snapshots a day, reducing the recovery point-in other words, the amount of information that can be lost. The NetApp technology is so efficient, users can't tell that we're creating a snapshot-there's almost no performance hit.

"One great thing about disk-to-disk is that the backup image looks exactly like the source image-same directory structure, same file names," says Dietrich. "So our engineers can do their own restores quickly now-something they like very much. You can't do that with tape."

Disk-based backups save money at Agilent

When the Agilent team was considering moving to disk-to-disk, one concern was voiced over and over again: It's going to be more expensive than tape. Dietrich didn't buy it, and he's been vindicated by results.

"We took a good look at our experience, and the numbers were impressive. When you add up the hard savings in hardware, software, and media costs, then throw in about 500 hours of IT support labor that has been reclaimed for other projects, our first-year savings came to $400,000."

The R-word: risk

An additional factor influencing the disk-versus-tape debate-especially in financial services and government-is perceived risk. "The risk associated with tapes is a hot issue right now," says Goel. "Say you're a bank. You have all these customer credit card numbers on your backup tapes. Now one of the tapes falls off the truck. You're at risk of a huge security breach and a ton of bad publicity.

"Granted, there's tape encryption. But companies are increasingly asking themselves, 'Do I really want to retrofit my entire tape environment for encryption?' 'Do I want to invest in the training and process changes that involves?' They're coming to the conclusion that moving tapes around is just a bad idea from a security point of view."

The alternative is replication. By backing up data to a different geographic location, you protect against local destruction of information-without physically moving tapes. What about the possibility of the data being intercepted enroute? "Most companies already have a secure networking infrastructure using technologies such as VPN and SSL," says Goel. "Replication leverages security that you've already proven and put into place, as opposed to having to install and learn a completely new technology such as tape encryption." In other words, if you can't trust the security of your network, you have bigger problems than backup.

The end of tape?

Is tape going completely away? Goel sees the industry moving that way: "Every customer we speak to realizes that it's not 'if,' but 'when,' they will eliminate tape from their day-to-day backup and restore operations. Some of them have gotten rid of tape altogether-or plan to, soon."

CTS's Wilson is on board, if cautiously. "Right now, we're still using tape for disaster recovery. We back up our primary storage to tape and truck the tapes from our Ohio data center to a safe site in Kentucky, on the other side of the river."

"We're now working on a way to replicate the backup information to one of our other sites instead of physically moving tapes. Once we accomplish that, I'm confident that we can eliminate tape entirely."

For Agilent, it's just a matter of time. "We haven't chosen to go completely tapeless yet. One reason is that, in our environment, the change rate is fairly high-30 percent or more of our data changes every day. That would eat up a lot of network bandwidth that we currently are using for other things," Dietrich says. However, bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, so Agilent can easily foresee a time when it will replicate everything and not need tape. Says Dietrich: "We know it's coming-soon. Disk-to-disk changes how you think about data protection, in good ways. The model scales easier than tape, and it integrates better into the rest of your storage architecture. Other groups in the company are adopting the same approach that we are using. Disk-to-disk is definitely the future at Agilent."