A 15 Minute Guide to Recovery Management
Foreword
For you as a business professional, time is a precious commodity. You constantly need to
distill concepts, evaluate options, and manage complex transactions. When you need information,
you need it in a form that can be assimilated quickly—forget the mind-numbing detail and get
to the point.
With that in mind, we’ve developed our series of 15-minute guides to essential topics in the
area of information management. This particular guide focuses on the importance of recovery
management and how it can help make your business more resilient and successful.
In about 15 minutes, we’ll define recovery management and explain why it’s important, outline
the benefits, suggest a deployment framework, and provide resources for you to learn more. We
think you’ll agree that it will be 15 minutes well spent.
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Recovery management—what is it and why is it important? 5
Recovery management defined 5
The importance of recovery management 5
Classic data protection versus recovery management 6
Inherent weaknesses of tape-based protection 6
Advanced recovery services require application awareness 7
The framework for recovery management 8
Protection technologies 8
Simplified management 8
Monitoring, reporting, and analytics 8
Building a recovery management strategy 9
3
Introduction
Very few business people need to be convinced that information is valuable to their organizations—
or that it must be carefully protected. But as corporations accumulate increasingly greater
volumes of information, protecting it efficiently and effectively becomes more difficult. At the
same time, the consequences and cost of a protection failure increase as information becomes
more and more critical to business performance.
No one understands this better than today’s storage administrator, who is charged with a seemingly
impossible task: hold down storage and protection costs, keep production data instantly accessible
24x7, and make sure than any information asset, no matter how obscure or seldom used, can be
quickly recovered on demand. These competing agendas signal a gradual shift in emphasis from
the process and technologies of information protection to the strategies and tactics necessary to
quickly, easily, and comprehensively respond to and recover from any data event.
Those strategies and tactics are the essence of recovery management. And whether the data
event is an unplanned operational disruption such as a virus, malicious intrusion, application
corruption—or even a catastrophe, a planned outage, regulatory change, or request for legal
discovery—recovery management enables your organization to respond effectively, confidently,
and with a minimum of disruption to your business.
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Recovery management—what is it and why is it important?
Recovery management defined
Recovery management is a new, strategic approach to data protection that focuses on fast,
reliable recovery as the aggregate goal of all protection activities. It combines backup, replication,
continuous data protection (CDP), analytics and reporting, and management services in an
integrated solution that delivers higher levels of recovery than any single technology, no
matter how robust.
Recovery management relies heavily on information lifecycle management (ILM) principles to
map protection and recovery services to the point-in-time business value of an application or
information. EMC, the market leader in ILM, is a pioneer in the integration of protection hardware
and software to achieve end-to-end recovery management solutions.
Recovery management is a new, strategic approach to data protection that focuses on fast,
reliable recovery as the aggregate goal of all protection activities.
The importance of recovery management
In today’s network environment, as many as 60 percent of backups simply do not complete
successfully. That means a lot of time and resources are expended while troubleshooting
backup problems. And many organizations never test their backup data or recovery procedures.
Can data be recovered? How long will it take? Will the recovered data be usable? Often, nobody
seems to know.
Even when backup technology works as intended, it often doesn’t scale well or adapt to changes
in business requirements and network infrastructure. Nor does it deliver the timely, meaningful
reporting that is necessary to develop efficient data-growth and related recovery strategies.
A backup-centric protection model just isn’t nimble or flexible enough to deal with the growing
complexity of doing business in an always-on, digital world. By contrast, a recovery-centric
protection model takes a broader, more holistic view of protection that is independent of
specific functional technologies. It is a different way of thinking about protection that delivers
measurable benefits.
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Classic data protection versus recovery management
Classic data protection is a lot of things, but foremost it is an approach that lacks a uniform
strategy. Its protection technologies include backup, replication, and CDP—the same technologies
on which recovery management relies. But with classic data protection their application is
fragmented. The emphasis with each technology is the protection of a specific database or
application, and the end point is really just backup. In essence, recovery management says that
protection technologies are just a means to an end. The ability to recover the right data, at the
right time, easily and reliably is what should drive whatever tactical decisions (protection
technologies, storage, hardware, management software, and so on) need to be made.
The focus on recovery also means that testing and simulation become a substantial part of deploying
a recovery management strategy. Much data that is backed up never has to be recovered—and no
one knows whether it could be or would be usable if it were. Many organizations have terabytes of
backup data that is kept for years and never tested.
In fact, when planning to migrate from a classic data protection approach to recovery
The benefits of recovery management management, you should consider whether or not to test the existing volumes of
backup data—and how much and when to test in the future. Part of deploying
Recovery management provides substantial recovery management includes developing realistic recovery simulations and running
benefits that will give an organization greater them to ensure that assumptions are accurate and the technologies in place perform
confidence in its recovery capabilities, regardless as expected. In other words, ensuring that recovery time objectives (RTOs) and
of the circumstances: recovery point objectives (RPOs) can be met.
• Align IT infrastructure with business objectives In addition to strategic differences, there are tactical differences between classic data
protection and recovery management. Two of the most important differences involve
– Ensuring business availability by delivering
1) tape- versus disk-based protection and 2) application awareness.
higher levels of recovery services
– Maximizing protection of enterprise Inherent weaknesses of tape-based protection
knowledge assets Classic data protection is virtually synonymous with tape. Tape has never been a very
– Delivering speed, ease, and confidence in reliable means of protecting information, and it’s even less reliable in recovering it.
recovering applications and data
First, in a large data environment, a full backup to tape is very time-consuming. Tape
• Leverage historical investments in point drives are mechanically complex, at least relative to disk drives. They are prone to
solutions malfunction and this tendency increases with age. Tape also degrades with age so
– Consolidating and managing disparate it is subject to data loss through drop out. All of these factors make tape slow and
technologies unreliable, which renders it problematic in high-availability environments.
– Eliminating the need to “rip and replace” Tape doesn’t get any better when it comes to restores. By nature, restoration from
– Lowering total cost of ownership tape is slow because of throughput limitations, the sequential nature of tape, and the
common problem of missing tapes. In business continuity terms, the RTO of “when
• Reduce costs associated with maintenance, will it be running” depends on the amount of time required to:
support, and administration
• Identify the appropriate tape(s)
– Reducing manual or redundant
administrative tasks • Retrieve those tapes, possibly from offsite storage
– Meeting more aggressive service level • Complete the restore
agreements
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Even if tapes and tape drives perform admirably, the transportation of tapes to and from offsite
storage can be a very weak link in a company’s data protection scheme. Tapes are lost or misplaced;
they fall off trucks; sometimes they’re stolen.
The alternative to tape-based protection is backup to and recovery from disk. As the cost of
disk-based storage continues to drop, becoming more competitive with tape, it has become a
realistic and cost-effective option when evaluating backup, recovery, and availability solutions.
During a backup to disk, data is read in random access mode so backups of data changes only
can be made rapidly. Disk-based protection also delivers fast, reliable recovery—reducing RTOs
from hours or days to mere minutes, regardless of the data event.
Leveraging disk-based protection, recovery management keeps more information readily online,
significantly improving service levels and delivering more value from data.
Advanced recovery services require application awareness
Application awareness goes beyond simply protecting data. As part of a recovery management
solution, it requires that all the components of an application be recoverable in the event of a
system failure, planned outage, or reconfiguration. Administrators must be able to simultaneously
recover and synchronize application metadata with associated production data across multiple
applications and databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Oracle.
Changes on every production host must be captured, written, and then integrated through a
consolidated management layer to enable recovery at any point in time. Application awareness
enables recovery of groups of associated databases and file systems at the application level, even
if they span different storage arrays.
Application awareness is a critical part of recovery management when:
• Data changes frequently
• Applications need to run continuously (24x7x365) and downtime creates a major
business impact
• Databases are large, making activities like traditional backup difficult and time-consuming
• Applications support large, transactional systems
• Applications have an RTO of seconds/minutes and an RPO of zero or near zero
“Another week, another few million confidential records lost”
—article title in InfoWorld magazine, June 10, 2005
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The framework for recovery management
Protection technologies
Of course, without protection technologies there is no data to recover and so no recovery
management. Recovery management uses the following technologies synergistically to apply
the right level of protection to information based on its business value:
• Backup: Any copy of original data is a backup and any process that produces that copy is a
backup process. While there are a variety of views and categorizations of backup processes,
including mirroring, replication, and continuous data protection, “backup” traditionally refers
to tape-based processes.
• Replication—There are hardware-based and software-based replication technologies, which
produce data copies in near realtime. Replication is frequently associated with higher-level,
disaster-oriented recovery planning.
• Continuous data protection (CDP)—CDP automatically saves a copy of every change made to data
while enabling the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time. With continuous data
protection, there are no backup schedules. CDP-based solutions can deliver granular restoration
at the object level such as files, mail boxes, and messages, and so on.
Simplified management
A recovery management solution should provide an administrative console that provides a
unified view of protection and recovery activities. From this console, administrators can track
the performance of protection schemes, allocate protection resources, log and respond to data
events, initiate recovery activities, and oversee service level agreements.
Management tools should also include the ability to create and enforce recovery policies that
encapsulate business needs and information value and map them to service level definitions. This
enables automated storage infrastructure configuration and service level enforcement.
In a data protection system that is focused on recovery, service level policies ensure that applications
and information consistently receive the appropriate level of protection. For example, an application
classified as “critical” may have an RTO of 20 minutes and an RPO of zero or near zero data loss.
Such data may be assigned to rapid access, disk-based storage that uses CDP to capture all data
writes and maintains a journal of all historical data states, enabling ”any point in time” recovery.
Monitoring, reporting, and analytics
Recovery management strategies must be flexible and adapt to a variety of changing business
requirements. It's not just about recovering from an outage or a natural disaster. Launching new
products can put greater pressure on customer service support and its need for data access.
Regulatory and compliance demands evolve. Corporate governance expectations can alter
retention policies. Geographic movement of groups within an organization can rearrange data
priorities in terms of remote facility backup.
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But that flexibility and adaptability depend as much on meaningful information about your
data protection infrastructure as they do on having the right technologies in place. That’s why
comprehensive, automated reporting and analytics are essential to recovery management. With
these capabilities you can:
• Improve protection processes: Detailed reports on backup processes and protection activities
will reduce the risk of recovery failure, identify weaknesses in recovery planning, and enable
better alignment of RTOs and RPOs with business requirements.
• Enhance recovery service level management: Monitoring performance against production
service level agreements enables performance tuning that supports optimum recovery.
• Minimize business disruption: Detailed information about IT configurations can ensure that
infrastructure matches data protection strategic objectives.
• Boost IT staff productivity: Automated reporting and analytics free valuable IT resources to focus
on core business activities instead of data gathering.
Building a recovery management strategy
The first step in building a recovery management strategy is to shift the organization’s perspective
from isolated information protection technologies to a holistic approach that encompasses
availability, protection, and recovery. Tactically this means assessing your current data protection
environment to determine:
• The relative values of business data
• Whether the RTOs and RPOs assigned to this data are appropriate
• If the associated levels of protection are adequate
The outcome of this assessment should reveal the basic shape of a tiered storage and recovery
services infrastructure, which can match storage devices, recovery service level objectives, and
data value. Since reliable recovery is the main goal, consideration must also be given to the
current volume of backup data, its age, and what percentage is usable. Testing should be done at
various age points.
To support your efforts, ensure that your IT infrastructure vendor has a well articulated recovery
management vision. The scope and effectiveness of any solution will depend on this as much as
any set of protection technologies.
EMC has a complete recovery management vision supported by the most robust portfolio of
recovery management products on the market, which meet every requirement of a deployment
framework. To learn more about EMC recovery management solutions, contact your local EMC
sales representative or authorized value-added reseller, call us at 1.866.464.7381 (outside the
U.S.: +1.508.435.1000) or visit us online at www.legato.com/recovery_management
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About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services, and solutions for
information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from
their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle.
Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com
To learn more about recovery management solutions from EMC, visit us online at www.EMC.com
or call 1.866.464.7381 (outside the U.S.: +1.508.435.1000).
EMC Corporation
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are trademarks of EMC Corporation. All
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property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2006 EMC Corporation.
All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
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