 | Level: Intermediate Chris Stakutis (chris.stakutis@us.ibm.com), CTO Emerging Storage Software, IBM/Tivoli
12 Feb 2007 As developers, we know how critical it is to back up our work. But backing up our data is a pain, so we procrastinate. Finally, technology exists in Tivoli® Continuous Data Protection for Files (CDP) that allows backing up to be continuous, transparent, and reliable.
Data loss fear
Do you remember when computer viruses first started appearing? It was 20 years ago this month (hard to believe) and most of us had only a casual concern. Sure, it made a few headlines but we were not affected. After about five years, either a virus had hit us personally or we knew someone who had lost use of their computer or data. It was finally a legitimate problem and we then dutifully spent our money on anti-virus software to protect our machines.
The stats are in
Why do so few of us back up our laptops or desktop machines? Many of us would be surprised to learn of these new statistics on non-virus data loss:
- One in 10 laptops will eventually be stolen according to the FBI
- Fifteen percent of laptops will fail in their first year
- Disk failures account for 50 percent of laptop failures
- One in four laptops will fail by their fourth year
We used to use cartridges
About a decade ago, computer aficionados would have some sort of cartridge tape drive in their home computer and would occasionally back up their systems. Less tech-savvy users simply did not have a strong enough reason to do back up as most of their life-important data was on an office server. Five years ago writable CDs were prevalent and we would occasionally “burn a CD” containing some of our important files. But by-and-large, we didn't have a compelling need.
Many changes
So what has changed? Many things. First, we use highly mobile laptops. Our hard drives are now huge with no chance of storing anything substantial on old CD or DVDs. Remember, the bigger the drives, the more data they will absorb over time. Second, today we all have 1,000s of digital photos and paid-for MP3 files. These are our keepsakes and our property and need appropriate protection from disasters. In addition, today a great many of us work from home (either because we no longer have a cube in a building or simply because it’s more convenient). Real corporate assets, real corporate hours, and real creative energy are at risk.
We’ve even see a dramatic shift in our children and spouses in the past five years. Before then, handing in an assignment in computer-form was a “nice-to-have” capability. Today the home computer is an essential tool for completing daily homework and chores. It is just as essential for the home owner who keeps tennis team schedules, recipes, or financial records. A lost document is a lost document and the cost is high, no matter who you are or what you do.
What we want from backup
So we know that we need our data protected by back up, but no one wants to 'do back up'. We have enough commitments and agendas in our daily lives, who has time for yet another one, especially one that could involve moving hundreds of gigabytes of data, which will take hours. So what do we really want from a back-up application?
Transparency: We don't ever want to run it or see it; it should just do its job, quietly in the background.
Every version: It is simply not good enough to back up my system one time a week or even daily. I need protection within the day. I make mistakes all day long, deleting files, over writing files, editing-out parts that I need later. .
Multiplicity: I want my data sprayed to several different places. I want to know that even my backup copy is in more than one place.
Locality: I want one of those target locations to be on my computer, so that I can do a restore no matter where I am, even on an airplane. And, I don't want back ups to fail just because the network isn't reachable; I want a solution that patiently waits, and quietly resumes the transfer whenever possible.
IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection
The award-winning IBM Continuous Data Protection for Files (CDP) product makes an immediate copy of your important files the moment they change. A copy is made locally and another one is queued for transfer to some off-machine target. Much like anti-virus software, CDP is not an application but rather a part of the computer. It sees all the transactions happen to files, and it can take real-time action to protect you computer, just like anti-virus software.
CDP has these important additional features:
- Special handling for e-mail files, which are notoriously huge, usually locked by the application, and change all day long.
- CDP stores the data on the target devices as ordinary files, not locked up in some proprietary bundle. Thus, you can use your own tools to index those files, restore them, and manage them.
- The target devices can be just about anything, from a simple USB key or disk, to an LUN on an SAN, to a file server or specialized back up server.
- Scale down and up with CDP. Single user? No problem. Use CDP with a USB key or disk. Small office or department? No problem. Use CDP with a file server share and use the built-in group management features. Huge enterprise? No problem. Use CDP with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager back-end (sold separately).
- And the price. It’s only US$35! A price almost every one can afford.
Summary
About 93 percent of corporate data now lives on laptops and desktop machines (IBM survey of SMB companies) and practically none of it is backed up. The average home owner rarely performs any sort of back up and we've quietly become foolishly agnostic of data loss. We are less likely to make gainful use of our car airbag or our life insurance policy, yet we all buy and own such instruments. We're even less likely to be affected by a computer virus today (compared to data loss), yet we all dutifully buy and run anti-virus software. Our awareness of data-risk is just starting to increase, and we're realizing that we can't use our old methods of backup (tape cartridge, burning CDs, e-mailing to ourselves) any longer. We need a tool that is truly part of the computer to do the best thing possible for us, so that we do not have to think about it at all.
Be proactive with protecting important PC data. IBM Tivoli CDP for Files is the answer.
Resources
About the author | 
| | Chris Stakutis is the creator of IBM CDP for files and now owns World Wide sales for the product.
Chris is the author of two popular books on data and storage technologies and
holds over 20 patents in the networking and data areas. Prior, Chris was the founder and CTO
of SANergy which was sold to IBM six years ago. SANergy was the first shared-SAN file system
technology to use a split-data/meta-data approach to high-speed data sharing. |
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