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New Backup Approaches: Snappier, Flatter, FasterNew approaches to data protection include more sophisticated snapshots and flat backups, plus instant virtual machine recovery, and a hybrid cloud backup process that takes advantage of local and cloud backups.

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Back Up to the Future with Data Protection Innovation

Backup technologies have seen great advances lately. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives are constantly improving, as new backup methods help your organization lose less data after a disaster and recover quicker. In fact, recovery is so quick with one technology that it’s labeled “instant.”

Also called recovery-in-place, instant recov-ery allows users to run a virtual machine from a backup copy. While this process may not be truly instant, in the past, there was a much lon-ger wait while data was restored.

Snapshots also provide nearly instantaneous recovery. And flat backups kick the process up a notch by performing storage snapshot rep-lication without a backup server or a media server, leading to potentially much cheaper backups.

But these technologies can be challenging

and require some guidance. For example, how do you know which snapshot method is right for you? What are the limitations to snapshots? Which vendors can manage flat backup?

This Drill Down will provide details on new backup approaches. In one piece, find out how flat backup, hybrid cloud backup and instant recovery can work for your organization. In another, you’ll read about how flat backup has developed into a powerful force for data protec-tion. And you’ll learn about the many different kinds of snapshots.

It’s an invigorating time for backup. Read on and discover some of the exciting options you have to keep your data safe. n

Paul CrocettiSite Editor

SearchDataBackup

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Valuable Options to Traditional Backup

The days of nightly tape backups are rapidly disappearing, and today’s backup administra-tors have more choices than ever when it comes to backing up their systems.

Some of these options, such as continuous data protection, have been around long enough that most IT pros are probably familiar with them. However, there are some other relatively new and highly innovative approaches to back-ups that might be less familiar.

This article discusses snapshots and flat backup, hybrid cloud backup and instant virtual machine (VM) recovery.

SNAPSHOTS AND FLAT BACKUP

Snapshots have existed as a data protection mechanism for quite some time. Conventional wisdom has long held that snapshots should be used as a convenience feature, not as a backup replacement, but this is starting to change.

There are a number of reasons why snap-shots have traditionally been discouraged as a data protection mechanism. For instance, snapshots typically reside on the same storage mechanism that they are intended to protect. If something were to happen to that storage mechanism, then the snapshots would likely suffer the same fate as the data that they were intended to protect. In addition, snapshots were not previously application-aware, and rolling back a snapshot of an application server without application awareness can cause data corruption and a number of other problems.

Snapshots are beginning to become a viable data protection mechanism. Some vendors have begun to build application awareness into their snapshot mechanisms. More importantly, snapshots are starting to be treated as a part of the backup process rather than an alternative to it.

Because snapshots are vulnerable to data

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loss just like the data that they are protecting, some vendors have begun using flat backups to protect snapshots. The basic idea behind a flat backup is that snapshots can be used as the first line of defense in a data loss event. If data is lost, the data can be quickly recovered from a snapshot. However, if a data loss event is sig-nificant enough to damage or destroy the snap-shots, then those snapshots can be recovered from backup.

Flat backups are about more than just back-ing up your snapshots. One important concept that differentiates a flat backup from tradi-tional backup is that snapshots are copied to a secondary storage location without the use of backup software or a media server. Further-more, the snapshots remain in their native format, which means the snapshot files can be used as is.

HYBRID CLOUD BACKUP

The term hybrid cloud backup tends to be a little bit misleading because it conveys the idea that the backup is either designed to protect a hybrid cloud or it depends on a hybrid cloud.

In reality, a hybrid cloud backup has little to do with a hybrid cloud. The term could prob-ably be more accurately described as a hybrid backup that leverages the cloud.

Both cloud backups and local backups have their advantages and disadvantages. Local

backups, for instance, are fast and reliable, but can be expensive to implement because of the hardware requirements. More importantly, local backups are vulnerable to data center-level disasters. If the data center were to be destroyed in a fire, a local backup would be destroyed along with everything else.

Cloud backups are a good alternative to local backups because they allow data backups to be stored securely off-site without the hassles of shipping removable media. The disadvantage, however, is that bandwidth limitations cause recoveries from the cloud to be slower than

If the data center were to be destroyed in a fire, a local backup would be destroyed along with everything else.

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recoveries from a local backup.A hybrid cloud backup is designed to capital-

ize on the best aspects of the two techniques. A backup is created and stored locally, but rep-licated to the cloud. That way, an organization can have the speed of a local backup with the protection of a cloud backup. This protection is usually achieved through the use of an appli-ance that acts as both a virtual tape library and a gateway to the cloud.

INSTANT VM RECOVERY

Instant VM recovery has been around for a few years and is one of the most useful backup fea-tures available today. Traditional restoration operations tend to be slow, and an organiza-tion may not be able to tolerate waiting for the restoration to complete. As the name implies, instant recovery allows an organization to recover from a disaster without the wait.

Instant VM recovery is based on the idea that many organizations use disk-based backups to protect their virtual machines. Because the

disk-based backup system remains online at all times, instant recovery can be achieved by run-ning a virtual machine directly from the backup storage. When doing so, instant VM recovery uses snapshots to ensure that the backups remain unmodified.

Once the backup virtual machine is running, workloads are redirected to the backup VM. This redirection is not permanent. The original VM is recovered in the background. Once the recovery process is complete, the original VM is once again used.

It is worth noting that although most of the major backup vendors offer an instant recovery feature, they do not always refer to the feature as instant recovery. The vendors all seem to have their own names for the feature.

Although backup technology remained rela-tively unchanged for decades, there has been an unprecedented level of backup innovation in recent years. Technologies such as flat backup, hybrid cloud backups and instant VM recovery are allowing data to be recovered in ways that have never before been possible. –Brien Posey

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Backup World’s Turning Flat

After many years of data protection stag-nation, there has been incredible innovation in the past few years.

For example, snapshot technologies have come a long way. Instead of relying on a few copy-on-write (COW) snapshots, we can now employ redirect-on-write (ROW) snapshots that don’t impact application performance nearly as much. Snapshots can be taken at much shorter intervals, significantly improving recovery point objectives.

Also, incremental forever and synthetic backups make weekly full backups almost obsolete. Inline compression and changed block tracking adds extra zip to capacity optimiza-tion, and the list goes on.

Another innovation emerging today is becoming known as “flat backup.” The term is still new and IT is just recognizing its signifi-cance. Basically, flat backup means perform-ing direct backups of snapshots to another,

generally lower-cost storage system without the use of traditional backup software.

The primary storage array’s operational snapshots provide the fastest way to recover, but when something goes wrong with the pri-mary storage and snapshots are not available

(or are corrupted) you can “recover” from pro-tection storage. But, “recovery” requires no for-mat changes, as it does when using traditional backup software. It would simply be a matter of moving the snapshot to primary storage or mounting the appropriate snapshot directly to the application. The recovery of a file or an object would be performed in a similar manner.

Instead of relying on a few copy-on-write snapshots, we can now employ redirect- on-write snapshots.

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These benefits all accrue from the fact that the protection storage understands the format of the primary storage.

FLAT BACKUP ISN’T A NEW CONCEPT

This concept is not entirely new. NetApp has been allowing its customers to do this for many years. But the technologies involved in flat backup have advanced recently. Now, at least two more major array vendors (HPE and EMC) have thrown their weight behind this tech-nology. HPE allows flat backup between 3PAR StoreServ and StoreOnce, and EMC between VMAX and Data Domain.

The question is: How effective is this technology and when should one deploy it? The advantages are fairly obvious. It simpli-fies the environment, reduces license fees and improves RPO and RTO. Sound too good to be true? There must be a catch somewhere, you say. Well, maybe not anymore. Here’s why:

First, COW-based snapshots simply impact application performance too much due to their requirement for one-read-two-writes each time a block is changed. This means one could

not realistically take a snapshot more than, say, once every hour. Today, with ROW-based snap-shots, it is possible to take a snapshot every minute if one chooses to, since each change only requires one write to the snapshot area. This fundamentally changes everything.

Second, using snapshots for data protec-tion was ill-advised in the past, because snap-shots reside on the same storage as the primary data. What would happen if the primary stor-age got hosed? This was a valid objection, but with flat backup, snapshots are replicated to protection storage. And the advances in pro-tection storage have been nothing short of spectacular. The efficiency of inline data dedu-plication, exemplified by products such as HPE StoreOnce and EMC Data Domain, is well accepted.

Using typical backup software, these devices deliver great results. But with flat backup, the data bypasses the application server and the media server and transfers directly into these devices. That reduces the impact of backup on applications. It also means less bandwidth is necessary to move data. Elimination of the media server and associated software also

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means greater simplicity and lower cost. Pro-tection storage may be in the same data center as the primary storage or in a remote site or both. In the latter case, the remote site also becomes the disaster recovery (DR) site and the replication happens between the two protection storage arrays across the WAN.

Third, application-consistent snapshots are now easy to implement. Microsoft VSS-based snapshot technology is commonplace—most arrays support it. Oracle RMAN support is also available. HPE, for instance, now supports SAP on Oracle and SAP HANA with its 3PAR Store-Serv snapshots. Lack of application-level sup-port was a common complaint against using snapshots before, but that is becoming less of an issue. Granted, it isn’t practical to take application-consistent snapshots every minute. However, taking crash-consistent snapshots every minute, supplemented with application-consistent snapshots every five or 10 minutes, may be sufficient. Even consistency groups are supported.

Fourth, many vendors offer seasoned soft-ware to manage flat backup and recovery. For example, NetApp has SnapProtect, HPE has

StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central and EMC has ProtectPoint. NetApp is a leader in snap-shot technology (it invented it) and the com-pany’s SnapProtect technology is very mature. In many cases, using software of this caliber can enable the application administrator or the

virtualization administrator to manage data protection and recovery, end to end.

Fifth, application recovery is incredibly fast with flat backup. Unlike traditional backup software that changes the format of the backed-up data, snapshot-based backups keep the disk-based format. This means the con-cept of “recovery” is changed dramatically. Data simply needs to be moved to the primary stor-age (or another storage system) or the snapshot can simply be mounted and used. This reduces RTOs to seconds or minutes.

This applies equally to applications running

In the past, snapshot-based backups did not provide cataloging and indexing, but that is no longer an objection.

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in a physical environment or as VMs. Both VMware and Hyper-V are supported by the vendors mentioned previously. Since there is no format change, searching for the right snapshot is a piece of cake. The file hierarchy is retained, so it is just a matter of picking the right snapshot. Snapshots can even be searched using keywords. In the past, snapshot-based backups did not provide cataloging and index-ing, but that is no longer an objection. Many products even allow non-disruptive recovery verification as often as one would like.

FLAT BACKUP WORTH A LOOK

I believe flat backup is worthy of consider-ation for users of primary storage products from vendors mentioned above. Other major vendors will likely offer flat backup in the near future. IBM has ProtecTIER and Dell has the DR family of protection storage devices that could be brought to market. If you have been watching the hyper-convergence trend recently, you will find that these vendors are telling IT there is no need for external backup soft-ware anymore and that all data protection is

“built in.” They don’t call it flat backup, but in essence, that is exactly what it is.

I do not believe for a second that flat backup will replace backup software anytime soon— if ever. Backup software has way too many other positives in its favor.

For more significant installations, where thousands of servers need to be protected, tape support is necessary, and other regulatory and compliance issues are involved, backup soft-ware is the way to go. Backup software is also required if you are dealing with a heteroge-neous storage environment, as all flat-backup products today are homogeneous. But in sim-pler environments, it might be worth consider-ing (or reconsidering) snapshot-based backup. Snapshots and associated technologies have evolved, making flat backup a serious con-tender in data protection. –Arun Taneja

Snapshots and associated technologies have evolved, making flat backup a serious contender in data protection.

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How to Use Snapshots to Protect Data

IT professionals increasingly count on snapshots to protect data in their virtual environment. In seconds, snapshots provide a frozen, secondary instance of data, which can be backed up, replicated or used as the baseline to start another virtual machine (VM).

However, there are two challenges when counting on snapshots for data protection. First, a snapshot is an instance, not a full copy. Second, snapshots can be implemented at the VM, hypervisor, backup software or storage array. Deciding which location should trigger and manage the snapshot can be confusing.

In this article, you will find out how to over-come the inherent weakness in snapshots and select the right snapshot method for you.

WHAT IS A SNAPSHOT?

Snapshots take advantage of the way data is organized on a storage device to create a

point-in-time instance of the original data set. Most file systems and storage systems have a two-tier organizational method for data. The first tier is metadata. The metadata tier is a small catalog that points to the second tier, the actual location of the data on disk.

Instead of copying all the physical data in tier 2, snapshots just copy the metadata in tier 1. That copy is made almost instantly, and takes very little additional storage capacity. Then, the blocks that are part of the snapshot are set to read-only. Going forward, the snapshot manager maintains two copies of metadata, an active copy that the production applications will continue to update, and a static copy, used by other applications like backup, replication and so on. The number of metadata copies grows with the number of active snapshots.

An important differentiator for snap-shot technologies is how they handle the modification of a block of data by production

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applications or users. Snapshots often use one of two methods to manage changes and main-tain snapshot integrity. The first option cop-ies the old data to a new location, updating the snapshot metadata to allow access to the old block. The second option writes the modified block to a new location and updates the active metadata copy. Of course, each product has its own nuances, but in general, they fall into one of these two types.

In either case, the snapshot data set is entirely dependent on the primary copy being accessible and the consumption of space occurs as the number of snapshots and the time those snapshots are retained increases.

SNAPSHOT + REPLICATION

Because snapshots are entirely dependent on the source data set, if that source data set is lost, due to a storage infrastructure or site fail-ure, the snapshot copies are also lost. As is, this vulnerability leaves the snapshot use case limited to recovering from data corruption or accidental file deletion.

However, because snapshots track block-level

changes, the technology can also be used to replicate data efficiently. Snapshot-based repli-cation copies only the blocks that have changed since the original snapshot. After the initial replication of data, these small block trans-

fers are ideal for updating a WAN-connected system located in another data center. And in this scenario, snapshots reside on a secondary system, so they are no longer dependent on the primary system for data.

This independence makes replication essen-tial to making snapshots useful for a broader set of data protection use cases. Another option is to copy snapshot data to a second-ary system in the primary data center in addi-tion to an off-site system. Then, if the primary storage system fails, the secondary on-site sys-tem has all the protected data for fast restores, while the off-site system has all the data for disaster recovery. Depending on the type of

Snapshots often use one of two methods to manage changes and maintain snapshot integrity.

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snapshot manager selected, that secondary sys-tem could be less expensive, potentially driving down cost.

SO, WHAT’S A SNAPSHOT MANAGER?

A snapshot manager is the software that trig-gers the snapshot and manages the multiple copies of metadata, keeping them up to date as the active data set changes.

The snapshot manager is often part of some-thing else, like an application, a file system, hypervisor, software-defined storage plat-form or physical storage array.

Each of these implementations has unique advantages, and many data centers will choose to use a mixture of products in order to meet their data protection and recovery goals.

Some applications have the ability to create and manage snapshot and replication jobs for the data they create. Also, third-party snapshot and replication utilities are often built for spe-cific applications.

While limited in scope, these products have the advantage of application awareness. They can gracefully put an application into a

quiesced state, while monitoring specific pro-cesses to confirm that the database is still up and running. If one of these processes stops responding, the snapshot can trigger an auto-matic recovery.

Another advantage of the application-aware snapshot method is that these products can direct replicated data to almost any second-ary storage device, potentially lowering overall storage costs. The shortcoming is that these products are limited to the application(s) that they support, meaning that the data center may require a separate snapshot process for each application.

FILE-SYSTEM SNAPSHOTS

Increasingly, snapshot capabilities are built into file systems. This snapshot method is similar to application snapshots but it operates on the whole file system instead of just an application. This is important, because file-system APIs can be used to trigger quiesced snapshots of applications.

These snapshots work across applications, but are limited to the operating system and

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virtual machine (VM). This means that each operating system in the environment will require its own snapshot technology.

Also, most file system snapshots cannot be managed centrally. Each server’s snapshot schedule has to be individually managed and monitored. For a large data center, this could lead to hundreds of individual snapshot jobs to track.

HYPERVISOR SNAPSHOTS

In a virtual environment, snapshots can be triggered at the hypervisor layer, simplifying snapshot management. Instead of performing and monitoring snapshots per VM and applica-tion, control is consolidated to the hypervisor. For example, VMware snapshots can be man-aged from within vCenter.

Like application and file system snapshots, the snapshot and replication target can be a secondary storage system from any manufac-turer, because snapshots are implemented at the hypervisor level.

All three of the above technologies (appli-cation, file system and hypervisor snapshot

methods) will typically exhibit performance problems as the number of and age of snap-shots increase. Enter the storage-based snap-shot method.

STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE SNAPSHOTS

The most commonly used snapshot method is via the storage infrastructure, usually per-formed by the storage hardware. There are several advantages of using hardware-based snapshots. First, snapshots are triggered per volume or system; there are fewer snapshot jobs to manage. Second, in most cases, hun-dreds of snapshots can be maintained without significantly impacting performance, thanks to dedicated storage processors handling the vari-ous metadata tables.

The downside is that hardware-based snap-shots are limited to their replication target. In many cases, the two storage systems must come from the same hardware vendor, but increasingly, these vendors allow the use of a lower-cost system from within their portfo-lio as the secondary target. Another downside is that if the data center has multiple storage

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systems, each storage system will have its own snapshot manager that needs to be monitored separately.

Software-defined storage, assuming it sup-ports snapshots and replication, solves these two issues by providing a common engine across multiple systems.

BACKUP-APPLICATION SNAPSHOTS

Backup applications serve two use cases as it pertains to snapshots. In the first, the software performs and manages the snapshot. In the second, the software can trigger the snapshot on another device and provide management of that snapshot.

In the first case, the backup application essentially replaces the snapshot capabilities of all the other methods listed above. In the sec-ond case, the software manages, orchestrates and organizes snapshot data.

The second use case is most interesting. It allows the use of the best snapshot technology from various hardware vendors, and it adds the ability to efficiently search for data within the snapshot. The challenge with the second use

case is that storage system support is lim- ited, but as the support grows, it could be a compelling use case.

SELECTING THE RIGHT SNAPSHOT

FOR YOUR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

Many data centers will need to use multiple snapshot methods. For example, application-awareness can be valuable. In that case, it may be worthwhile to manage snapshots for mis-sion-critical apps separately, using an applica-tion-specific snapshot method.

Also, most large data centers will not be able to use file-system or hypervisor-based snap-shots exclusively due to performance concerns. Large organizations typically use native storage system or backup software snapshot capabili-ties. However, the snapshot capabilities of file systems and hypervisors are still necessary, because the storage and backup snapshots can use them as a framework to accurately capture snapshot data.

When selecting a snapshot method, start by selecting an approach that provides the broad-est coverage. –George Crump

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

GEORGE CRUMP is president of Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization segments.

BRIEN POSEY, MCSE, has received Microsoft’s MVP award for Exchange Server, Windows Server and Inter-net Information Server. Posey has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and has been responsible for the department of information management at Fort Knox. You can visit his personal website at www.brienposey.com.

ARUN TANEJA is the founder, president and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group, an analyst and consult-ing group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.

New Backup Approaches: Snappier, Flatter, Faster is a SearchDataBackup.com e-publication.

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