Fixing broken backup processes at remote sites

ESG estimates that 75% of the data on a corporate network resides outside the data center. How are all of those remote servers being backed up? And what about the remote desktops and laptops? Besides the risk associated with lost productivity and lost work in remote offices, what about the risk at the corporate level of a law suit or a fine for a regulatory mandated regulation?

The traditional method of backing up remote offices is to deploy a smaller version of the same solution used in the data center. Instead of a big tape library for example, a tape autoloader can be used to back up a few remote servers (file/print, mail, ... ). This works in theory, but often fails in practice. Who's responsible? Is there someone at the remote site who can operate the tape backup software? When they have problems, who do they call? Is tape rotation and tape cleaning being handled properly? Are viable backups making it off-site so that the remote site can be rebuilt after a disaster? There's got to be a better way …

Like most small office IT problems, the remote protection problem was solved long ago in the data center. Large data centers have been backing each other up over a wide area network for years. Real-time mirroring, periodic replication and remote tape vaulting are some of the many technologies that have been used to solve this problem. If money is no object, there are plenty of options. The challenge for remote offices however is that money is definitely an object. Replicating all the gear located in all of the remote sites is unrealistic. And then there's the recurring cost of WAN bandwidth. Fat bandwidth to every remote office so that everything can be replicated to a central office is cost prohibitive. Wouldn't it be cool if replication over the WAN as done in the data center could be made simple and cheap enough for deployment in remote offices?

As you might guess given my leading questions above, affordable remote replication and remote backup solutions is now available. It's an area of rapid innovation and, as usual, startup companies are leading the way. Technologies including backup to disk, WAN optimization, duplicate elimination, continuous incremental backups and bandwidth metering are the key. Like the red hot WAN optimization and Wide Area File Services markets (WAFS) markets, leading systems and solutions vendors are evaluating options and choosing partners. M&A activity will likely follow.

If you are a corporate data center manager looking to consolidate, protect and accelerate applications running in remote offices, don't forget the remote backup problem as you architect your remote office of the future. Ask your systems and storage vendors if they have a remote backup strategy. For the early adopters in the crowd, you might want to schedule an evaluation. Emerging companies in this space include Asigra, Avamar, Signiant and FilesX.