Data Backup Services: Protection and Recovery

Introduction

Challenges
-No policy data management standard, which creates isolated data on the network: in folders file sharing servers, nonstandardized, personal profiles, sites and local PCs.
Services-archiving and backup precarious or nonexistent hinder compliance with the regulations.
-The lack of a plan for disaster recovery can result in loss of data and critical systems

IT Challenges
-The failure or corruption of hardware means a catastrophic data loss
-The administration server is expensive
-The IT staff has no tools for managing backup and restore

Projects
-Implement solutions for backup and restore critical servers
-Consolidate and migrate file servers and print to simplify the process of backup and restore
Deploy tools, data protection for critical servers

Business Benefits
-A strategy for efficient data management promotes stability in the organization and improves productivity
-Standards for data management allow you to apply policies and define SLAs, improving the company’s relationship with IT
-A strategic approach to data management enables better procedures for data retrieval, which gives the company a strong platform
-The organization is close to implementing regulatory compliance

IT Benefits
The data-critical applications are stored in a safe place off-site IT
-Basic Policies were established to ensure access to physical media (tapes, optical devices) when necessary in the Standardized Model for Optimizing Infrastructure addresses key areas of Protection and Recovery services including backup and recovery for servers defined critics. This level requires that your organization has procedures and tools in place to manage backup and recovery of data on critical servers.

Requirement: Services backup and recovery for critical servers defined

Target
You should read this section if you do not have a solution for backup and restore 80% or more of your critical servers.

Overview
Technologies backup and recovery provide the basis for strategies to protect data that help organizations meet their requirements for availability and accessibility of data. The storage, restoration and recovery are the main operational activities of storage management related to a property’s most important business: corporate data.
Data centers can use redundant components and technologies for fault tolerance (such as server clustering and mirroring software or hardware) to ensure high availability with replication of critical data. However, only those technologies can not solve the problems caused by corruption or deletion of data, which can occur due to errors in applications, viruses, security breaches or bugs User.

There may also be a requirement to retain information in a format for archiving, for example, for audit or legal sector, this requirement may include transactional data, documents and information collaboration such as email. Therefore, you must have a strategic data protection that includes a schedule of comprehensive backup and recovery to protect data against any disruption or unforeseen disaster or to meet the requirements for data retention in the industry.
The following guidelines were based on guidelines to implement the Windows Server System Reference Architecture for service backup and recovery (may be in English).

Phase 1: Evaluation

The Assess phase examines the business case for backup and recovery and makes an inventory of backup and recovery currently defined. Backup activities ensure that data is properly stored and available for both restoration and recovery, according to business requirements. The design solutions for backup and recovery needs to take into account the requirements of the organization’s business and operating environment.

Phase 2: Identification

The goal of the identification phase of your solution for backup and recovery is to identify the targeted data repositories and prioritize the critical nature of the data. Critical data should be defined as the data necessary for the operation of the company and must comply with laws and regulations. Any solutions for backup and recovery are deployed must be predictable, reliable and able to comply with the regulations and process data as quickly as possible.

The challenges faced in data management are:

- Manage the growth of data volumes.
- Manage the infrastructure storage to improve the quality of service, as defined by the contract service level and at the same time reducing the complexity and cost control.
- Integrate applications with requirements for storage and data management.
- Operate in windows backup data brief or nonexistent.
- To support existing IT systems that can not run the latest technologies.
- Manage islands of technology with decentralized administration.
- Assess the value of the data so that appropriate strategies can be applied to each type of data.

Because the process of backup and restore of all organizational data is very important, this topic describes the policies and procedures for backup and restore that you must implement in critical servers in order to move from the Basic to the Standardized successfully.
Phase 3: Assessment and planning

In the assessment and planning, you should take into account a number of data points to determine the solution for backup and recovery best for your organization. These requirements may include:

- Amount of data to be stored.
- Projected growth of data.
- Performance of the backup and restore.
- Need to backup and restore of databases.
- Requirements backup of emails.
- Tables for backups and restores.
- Requirements for archiving data (off-site storage).
- Identification of constraints.
- Selection and purchase of components of infrastructure for storage.
- Plan for monitoring and storage management.
- Test the backup strategy.

Backup plan
In developing a plan for backup and recovery for critical servers, you should take into consideration the following factors:
-Backup Mode
- Type of backup
- Backup topology
-Service Plan

Data Protection Manager (DPM) is a Microsoft server application that provides protection and recovery of disk-based data to file servers on the network. The Planning and Implementation of DPM contains much information about setting up a plan for backup and recovery.

Backup modes

The backup mode determines how the backup should be executed against the data to be included in it. There are two ways to perform backups of data:

- Online backups. The backups are done while the data remains accessible to users.
- Backups offline. The backups are done while the data is inaccessible to users.

Backup Types
Several types of backup can be used for online backups and offline. The SLA, the backup window requirement and recovery time of a single environment determine which method or combination of methods is ideal for him.

Backup-total. Includes all files on all disks.
- Incremental backup. Includes the files that have been added or changed since the last incremental backup.
-Differential backup. Includes the files that have been added or changed since the last full backup.

Backup topologies
Originally, the only type of storage technology that required backup involved hard drives connected directly to the storage adapters on servers. Nowadays, this type of storage is known as direct attached storage, or DAS (Direct-Attached Storage). The scenario of backup and recovery has changed considerably with the development of technologies such as Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). SAN environments, in particular, provide a significant opportunity to streamline and simplify the process of backup and recovery.

-Backup and recovery of the local server (DAS). Each server is connected to its own backup device.
Backup and recovery-based LAN (NAS). This is a multi-tier architecture in which some servers give up early to work and collect metadata about the backup data (also known as control data) while other servers (designated as media servers) perform the actual task of managing the data that is being backed up.

Service Plan
You need to take into account many factors when designing their service backup and recovery. Among the factors to be considered include:
-Priorities backup and rapid recovery – Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
-How often the data changes.
-Time constraints in the backup operation.
-Media Storage.
Requirements for data retention.
Prevalence data recovered – Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Recovery Plan
Even the best backup plan may be ineffective if there is a recovery plan in place. The following are some of the elements of a good recovery plan data.

Verify backups
Verify backups is a critical step in disaster recovery. You can not retrieve data unless you have a valid backup.
Back up the existing log files before any restoration

A good prevention is to back up all existing log files before you restore a server. If loss of data or a set of older backup is restored by mistake, the logs will help you recover.
Conduct comprehensive periodic

A simulation assesses your ability to recover from a disaster and make plans for disaster recovery. Create a test environment and try a full recovery of data. Make sure to use data backups of production and record the time it takes to recover the data. This includes retrieving data from off-site storage.

Create a disaster kit

Plan ahead, creating a disaster kit that includes a sheet of setting hard disk partition, hardware and operating system, a RAID configuration and so on. This material is very easy to build and can minimize the recovery time to a large extent, can be spent in finding information or records required to configure the recovery system.
Phase 4: Deployment

After deployment of the components of infrastructure and proper storage to the plan of service backup and restore, the organization can install the storage solution and tools for monitoring and managing the associated IT environment.

Operations
The monitoring and management of resources management network for backup and recovery used in the production environment are extremely important tasks. Whatever the process be centralized or distributed, technologies and processes for backup and recovery must be managed. Anyway, there should be the ability to easily monitor and analyze the availability, capacity and performance management systems storage.

SRM (management of storage resources) is an important activity of storage management whose objective is to ensure that important storage devices such as disks, are formatted and installed with the appropriate file systems.

Typically, the tools used in the production environment to monitor and manage storage resources consist of functions provided as part of the operating systems installed and / or functions provided with other solutions such as Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

The use of a system of management of storage resources requires appropriate training and knowledge. It is necessary to understand some of the basic concepts necessary to monitor and manage resources successfully and to analyze the results. Moreover, selecting the right tool for the right job enhances the ability of the operations group to ensure the availability, capacity and performance of resources and data storage.