Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments, Second Edition

Chapter 10

Backup and Archive

Key Concepts

Backup Granularity

Backup Architecture

Backup Topologies

Virtual Tape Library

Data Deduplication

Virtual Machine Backup

Data Archiving

A backup is an additional copy of production data, created and retained for the sole purpose of recovering lost or corrupted data. With growing business and regulatory demands for data storage, retention, and availability, organizations are faced with the task of backing up an ever-increasing amount of data. This task becomes more challenging with the growth of information, stagnant IT budgets, and less time for taking backups. Moreover, organizations need a quick restore of backed up data to meet business service-level agreements (SLAs).

Evaluating the various backup methods along with their recovery considerations and retention requirements is an essential step to implement a successful backup and recovery solution.

Organizations generate and maintain large volumes of data, and most of the data is fixed content. This fixed content is rarely accessed after a period of time. Still, this data needs to be retained for several years to meet regulatory compliance. Accumulation of this data on the primary storage increases the overall storage cost to the organization. Further, this increases the amount of data to be backed up, which in turn increases the time required to perform the backup.

Data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used, from primary storage to a low-cost secondary ...