Question

After reading Chapter 4, conduct some research on backup media and systems (tapes, disks, NAS/SAN, cloud, etc). Pay particular attention to the following criteria: capacity, cost, speed, and "bare metal" restore. After describing several alternatives, make and defend a recommendation for a server that has 12 TBytes of storage. Book Security and Risk Management.

Answer 1

Answer:-

capacity:-

While storage media are commonly chosen of the same size or of larger capacity than it is needed for backups, it’s not a strict rule. For instance, buying a 250GB hard drive to store backup of your musiclibrary is very much a waste of money, since several DVD discs can be as effective and cost much less. And vice versa, storing a complete disk image backup on dozens of removable media is also not a good idea, as restoration of backup will take a lot of time and efforts. In practice, in each concrete case it is advised to find a balance between media’s capacity and other factors

cost:-

• Backing up data can mean different things to IT and business users. To a business user, a backup may imply no loss of data, and nearly instantaneous data recovery. To an IT department, data backup may imply a tape at an offsite location.

It's important to understand how technology choices can impact business. This relationship can be represented by a simple equation. On one side is the business opportunity or revenue potential, and on the other side the cost of providing the data protection service. The cost of providing the service must be less than the business opportunity.

speed:-

Some backup software solutions have the ability to exploit high performance networks and storage subsystems. One key element that can be used to reach the maximum throughput of the backup infrastructure is multistreaming (aka splits). Multistream capable backup applications can send multiple steams of data, from a single client, simultaneously and/or; multiple streams of data from multiple clients simultaneously. A finely tuned backup environment can produce speed related dividends that can shrink a backup window to a fraction of its currently painful size. In fact, In fact, I have seen backup speeds in production environments of over 300MB/s while going to a single tape drive housed in a tape library in a small environment. Let alone the speeds that some of our larger customers are achieving. Great speeds can be obtained so long as speed limitations can be overcome.

bare material:-

Bare metal recovery or bare metal restoration is a type of disaster recovery for your network.

This is used after a catastrophic failure, breach or emergency; the “bare metal” part of the term refers to starting almost from scratch. When an IT expert performs this task, they are working from the very beginning and recovering, reinstalling and rebuilding your system from the ground (or bare metal) up.

This approach means starting with clean, working hardware and reinstalling operating systems and other software; this way you know your network is being restored on a new, error-free base without any lingering risk or problems.

restore:-

Data restore is the process of copying backup data from secondary storage and restoring it to its original location or a new location. A restore is performed to return data that has been lost, stolen or damaged to its original condition or to move data to a new location.

There are several circumstances that lead to the need for a data restore. One is human error, where data is accidentally deleted or damaged. Other circumstances include malicious attacks where data is exposed, stolen or infected; power outages; manmade or natural disasters; equipment theft, malfunctions or failures; or firmware corruption.

Data restore makes a usable copy of the data available to replace lost or damaged data and ensures the data backup is consistent with the state of the data at a specific point in time before the damage occurred.

make and defend a recommendation for a server that has 12 TBytes of storage:-

1. Know your data. "All data is not created equal -- and understanding the business value of data is critical for defining the storage strategy," says

Souvik Choudhury, senior director, Product Management at SunGard Availability Services. So when formulating your data storage management policy, ask the following questions:

• How soon do I need the data back if lost?

• How fast do I need to access the data?

• How long do I need to retain data?

• How secure does it need to be?

• What regulatory requirements need to be adhered to?

2. Don't neglect unstructured data. "Think about how you might want to combine multi-structured data from your transactional systems with semi-structured or unstructured data from your email servers, network file systems, etc.," says Aaron Rosenbaum, director, Product Management, MarkLogic, a database solution provider. "Make sure that the data management platform you choose will let you combine all these types without months or years of data modeling effort."

3. Understand your compliance needs. "If you are a publicly traded company or operating within a highly regulated industry such as financial services or healthcare, the bar has been set high for compliance and security," says Jay Atkinson, CEO of cloud hosting provider AIS Network.

Book Security and Risk Management:-

Designate program leaders. Assigning a group of employees to backup data security chores—from start to finish—will position your organization to address challenges and lessen the risks that litter the business landscape before problems happen. Make sure each member of the team understands your best practices for managing that media.

Understand backup media lifecycles. To create a comprehensive and secure media management program, you must understand the complicated path that backup media takes from your offices to offsite storage facilities and back again. That means preparing the media for transfer, replacing tapes produced by your backup system with another tape, and ejecting all tapes scheduled for transport.

Place media ready for transport in a secure, environmentally controlled area. Only employees authorized to exchange media with a third party should be permitted here.

Ensure that media exchanges take place only between designated employees and the courier. The courier should produce identification and follow a checklist to ensure media are exchanged securely.

Control authorization and access. Set up a list of employees permitted to work with backup tapes and provide that list to your offsite service provider. This is critical to ensure Chain-of-Custody. Companies often get lax about authorization; this leaves you open to theft, loss or inadvertent disclosure.

Create policies to track and log data to prevent discrepancies from snowballing. Along with getting media ready to move offsite, make sure each shipment has a tape validation list. It should detail what’s in each shipment and what the final inventory should include. Any discrepancies can be addressed immediately, thereby ramping down risk.

Ensure processing quality. You can never completely factor out human error, but accurate validation files attached to your media shipments can help distinguish between true discrepancies and recurring inaccuracies. It’s well worth the upfront work—remember, discrepancy investigations can cost you time, money and efficiency. But make sure you review discrepancy reports daily to ensure problems are fixed quickly and are not repeated.

Institute rigorous encryption and disaster recovery policies. Encryption not only guards the data on backup media, it also can protect your company’s reputation, since many regulations do not require you to report the loss of encrypted media. A disaster recovery plan that incorporates your offsite service partner will help ensure your company’s ability to bounce back from problems.