Tape may be everyone's darling, but SPHiNX is a dandy earning new friends daily.
I recently wrote an article titled "Bulletin: Tape Is Alive and Well at IBM." It was about several new technologies that will effectively extend the life of tape as a viable backup solution for a decade or longer. However, the whole time I was writing it, I was thinking, "Wow, this is amazing! I thought tape was on the way out long ago!"
That, of course, is a naïve belief. The fact is that almost every company uses tape in one capacity or another for backup or archiving even if they have a more robust backup solution running in parallel.
A study commissioned by Vision Solutions last year, Research Study: The State of Resilience and Optimization on IBM Power Systems, surveyed nearly 4,000 IBM i and AIX users and revealed that tape backup remains the foundation of all but a few data protection schemes. Between 85 and 92 percent of AIX and IBM i shops included it among their various backup solutions. Offsite storage also was high on the list of affirmative responses, and we can probably conclude that companies are making tapes and storing them offsite. Makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is that a significant group of AIX and IBM i shops—some 43 percent—rely on tape first and foremost to recover data in cases where a few files are missing. Yikes! How long is that going to take, anyway? A month? Well, maybe not that long, assuming you can get the padlock on the company's storage locker unfrozen with a little WD-40 and find the tape you want somewhere underneath the excess office equipment that the Facilities Department was supposed to sell a year ago.
OK, so you blow your recovery time objective. Who cares? (Say, did you ever ask for a copy of one of your checks the night before an IRS audit only to have the bank tell you it would take a couple of weeks before they can pop it in the mail to you? Who cares now, eh? Could it possibly be the customer? Hello? Here is a line from the Vision Solutions report, page 14:
"It is quite likely that these companies do not and in fact cannot actually meet their reported RTOs and RPOs when data loss occurs. One assumes that if they had other options that were faster and offered more complete recovery, they would use them first. So by relying upon tape, they face RPOs that, on average, are longer than 12 hours (and often 24 hours and more) with RTOs that are equally undesirable."
The subtle deception about backup tapes is that there is always a period between when the data is created and when the tape backup is made. If you back up to tape every hour, you're not going to have much of a window of vulnerability, but most companies back up once a day or, in many cases, once a week. The Vision study asked respondents if they had ever experienced a complete loss of data that they never were able to recover. Yes, yes, and again yes! Many of them had lost data—permanently! How could this happen, Igor?
Well, the predominant reason cited by 45 percent of those willing to admit to complete failure was "No backup copy." In other words, the data was lost before the tapes (or flash or disk copies) were created. What are people thinking? Oh, I know, we're backing up tonight, and of course nothing of value is going to be created today. That makes sense. It's sort of like saying it doesn't really exist until it's backed up.
The second most frequently cited reason for failing to recover lost data—expressed by some 37 percent of respondents who permanently lost data—was "Bad/unusable backup copy: Bad or missing backup tape/disk copy." In other words, the dog ate the tape. Ouch.
In all fairness, however, you can't knock tape completely. I've previously written about the AS/400 operator who worked for a Northridge, California, cat-food company and who nightly put the backup tape in her purse before leaving for the day. It was the perfect, if somewhat eclectic, offsite backup. The morning of January 17, 1994, an earthquake took about a minute, beginning at 4:31 a.m., to destroy her company's offices and knock its lone AS/400 onto the concrete, leaving it upside down in a puddle of water (it actually still worked after that).
The operator lived on L.A.'s west side, away from the epicenter, and wasn't seriously affected, but she was concerned about the company located on the fault line. She told me later, "I heard about it on the radio, but I wasn't worried about the files because I still had the backup tape in my purse." Replacing the files wasn't a problem that day; replacing the office was more of a challenge, but IBM Disaster Recovery Services had the firm up and running in short order and the employees back at work well before any of its neighbors.
So making a tape can sometimes be like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but more often than not, it's an incomplete solution. That's why a number of companies today are looking at virtual tape backup solutions, appliances that appear to the computer to be tape machines (to preserve settings) but actually contain hard disks for superior performance in both backing up and restoring data. Most companies mount the virtual tape appliance between the computer and the tape drive, so the data is still backed up to tape, but there is no delay in writing the data to disk. If you want to have two virtual tape machines, you can locate the second remotely and back up from the local virtual appliance to the remote appliance over a WAN. That way, you can dispense with tape altogether. Having an encryption solution protects your data while at rest.
Recently, Crossroads and Help/Systems announced an agreement whereby Crossroads' SPHiNX virtual tape appliance will seamlessly integrate with Help/Systems' Robot/SAVE solution. Robot/SAVE is a lot easier to use than BRMS and makes backing up to Crossroads' SPHiNX appliance so easy that any IBM i operator can do it, according to Glenn Haley, Crossroads product marketing manager.
Tom Huntington, vice president of Technical Services at Help/Systems, says the combination of Robot/SAVE and Crossroads' virtual tape appliance "helps eliminate several backup and recovery headaches that many data center managers struggle with daily. Issues with tape mounts, replication, off-site storage, encryption, tape costs, and security are just a few of the items we can resolve with this solution set," he says. The partnership also creates a significant new sales channel for Crossroads’ SPHiNX product and opens additional integration opportunities with Help/Systems' Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPORTS solutions, the companies said.
SPHiNX was introduced at COMMON 2009 in Reno, and Haley tells MC Press Online the company will be at COMMON 2010 in Orlando with several new announcements. "There is going to be a lot of excitement around Crossroads this year, and, as promised, we're going to be announcing some additional host connectivity, so stay tuned!" One can only imagine the convenience of having a single virtual tape appliance that would back up to all of one's various IBM servers, including AIX. Could this be what Haley is alluding to? I guess we'll know in a couple of months.…
"We're dedicated toward focusing our efforts in the IBM environment and with COMMON," says Haley. "We are working with several IBM Business Partners with whom we have established relationships, and they will be in Orlando, and I think that the co-marketing, including that with Help/Systems, should highlight Crossroads' solutions even more than was evident from our single booth in Reno," Haley says. The company's top management will be at COMMON, and Haley says that Crossroads expects to make quite an impression at the show.
Meanwhile, Help/Systems is presenting a free introductory training Webinar featuring the Robot/SAVE solution with the Crossroads SPHiNX virtual tape appliance at 12:00 noon (CT) on Thursday, March 18. Without even leaving the office, this could be an ideal way to learn more about how a virtual tape appliance could augment your IBM i's backup routine.
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