NetTrac Communications Inc. - News
Posted: September 03, 2009
The Problem of Backups
In the world of high volume data flows and busy E-commerce web sites we have often been asked to provide specialized backup services to protect against disastrous data loss. But when the worst happens you are stuck with a bare metal restore situation that is likely to take hours if not days to get back up and running. A couple of years ago I experienced the loss of fault tolerance on not one, but two drives that were part of a RAID 5 configuration. Sadly this server was the workhorse of a large municipality’s Microsoft Exchange setup. To recover the data, rewrite the mail stores, rebuild the OS, and generally get the system back to working order took over 36 hours. This is not to mention a system administrator working around the clock during which he almost had several nervous breakdowns! The end result was lost emails, lots of down time and a shocking loss of confidence in the municipality’s IT department. In actual fact, it was my opinion that the system administrator that dealt with this disaster pulled off nothing short of a miracle in pulling all the data back together with disk recovery software, restoring other data from backups, and showing an incredible amount of courage and patience where others may have just walked away and started over.
The lesson here is pointed. No matter how many tape storage vaults you have, or how often you backup, a hardware failure that causes data loss can leave you in a situation that is nothing short of a melt down. And your disaster recovery program is going to fall short in being able to recover 100% of your lost data. So even if you have a moderately busy E-commerce site, you are facing lost sales, and worse, loss of your customer’s confidence. In a more critical situation, where you perhaps have an online application that is constantly writing accounting data, or surveys, a hardware failure resulting in data loss will have even the most level headed system administrators and hard core business people weak in the knees and groveling for their customer’s forgiveness.
While NetTrac’s default hosting service includes an exhaustive regimen of backups for all of our hosting customers and various hosting platforms, we, like everyone else, have been vexed by the ramifications possible data loss between scheduled backups. We have been constantly on the lookout for a reliable and cost effective solution. Block level backup technology seems to be the fresh answer to an old problem. Read on.
The Solution
Recently and luckily, there have been a handful of software companies that have pushed backup technology to the bleeding edge and produced a method of doing continuous block level backups. While the ability to read disk data blocks en masse has been around for a long time, it is only recently that it has been developed into a fully featured backup system. This technology has a few tremendous advantages over the traditional file based backup. Firstly, as it reads disk blocks and clusters directly off the disk volume, it is incredibly fast. Also, digital logging of disk blocks keeps track of what blocks have changed and which have remained unwritten making continuous incremental backups of large disks highly efficient. The restore of large data repositories can now take minutes rather than hours. Benchmarking tests show that the data from a near-full 160 Gigabit hard drive can be restored in a matter of minutes. It is also possible to take disk snapshots of entire data structures every few minutes maximizing restore capability. Further, those companies that are truly offering continuous block level backups have dispensed with data de-duplication algorithms. (Often used in conventional file level backup systems to save space on media as well as reduce read/write times. Traditionally this was based on the premise that, since many identical files can be scattered across a data system, only one backup of such a file is required. This can cause serious headaches when you are trying to restore a system disk and files required by the operating system are not where they are supposed to be.) With block level backups this saving is not required as data is read, deltas computed, backups written all at disk speed. “Directory transversal times” on data reads and writes are completely eliminated. The result is that restored data is complete and accurate in every detail.
But the real “bonus” is that the backup process runs continuously, working away in the background, taking the changed data from your hard drive and safely tucking it away. So, if the worst happens, you may lose a couple minutes of data rather than the hours of data that has changed since your last “regular” backup finished in the middle of “last night". Overall, this is a great step forward in data protection and data recovery.
Many of these products come pre-licensed for data base backups aside being packed with lots of useful tools. Some have been designed specifically for the Microsoft Exchange server platform so that a data loss does not mean you have lost everyone’s mail from the day of the failure. These applications are designed particularly to work with the special data format of the mail stores and databases so that recovery of complicated data structures, such as in Microsoft Exchange, is normally flawless.
Leveraging Block Level Continuous Backups to Protect Your Data:
Make it a Part of Your Corporate Continuity Plan
We are pleased to announce that NetTrac is now making available, to its mission critical application and dedicated hosting customers, Block Level Continuous Backups of data stores or entire systems. This technology allows us to add to our arsenal of high end solutions aimed at providing more peace of mind to those whose data is mission critical. It is our hope you will take advantage of this product and utilize its benefits to protect your business interests against lost data. Now for less than a dollar a day, you will never be caught having lost a day’s work in data, or critical sales information, or data belonging to your customers. A dollar a day allows you continuously backup 100 gigabytes of data and store it across multiple network attached storage devices that are part of our network.
Our Continuous Data Protection offering comes with access to your own control panel so that you can manage users, schedule tasks, configure compression, setup backup parameters, configure mail alerts, browse files and folders in your backup, set logging levels, review system events and most importantly, with the click of your mouse, do restores and do them incredibly fast!! The list goes on from here. Overall, this product is the "must have" solution for anyone who has ever worried about their data or thought about how bad things would be if disaster strikes.
NetTrac’s CDP (Continuous Data Protection) Service is now available to our data center collocation and dedicated hosting customers. It will also be made available to our shared hosting customers that have a legitimate need for continuous backups. This service will not be available as an“online backup service” outside our data center or network infrastructure.
Dedicated hosting and collocation customers that wish to know more about NetTrac CDP Services and how you can get started, should send inquires through our “Contact Us” page or email NetTrac/CDP. Network support customers that wish to improve their onsite backup technology should email support@nettrac.net
If you are not a NetTrac customer but are interested in Continuous Data Protection, give us a call or use any of the the links above to find out how NetTrac can safely and cost effectively house your application and mission critical data. You will be pleasantly surprised how affordable high quality solutions can be.
NetTrac Announces Continuous Data Protection: Affordable Plans for Unbeatable Protection
The Problem of Backups
In the world of high volume data flows and busy E-commerce web sites we have often been asked to provide specialized backup services to protect against disastrous data loss. But when the worst happens you are stuck with a bare metal restore situation that is likely to take hours if not days to get back up and running. A couple of years ago I experienced the loss of fault tolerance on not one, but two drives that were part of a RAID 5 configuration. Sadly this server was the workhorse of a large municipality’s Microsoft Exchange setup. To recover the data, rewrite the mail stores, rebuild the OS, and generally get the system back to working order took over 36 hours. This is not to mention a system administrator working around the clock during which he almost had several nervous breakdowns! The end result was lost emails, lots of down time and a shocking loss of confidence in the municipality’s IT department. In actual fact, it was my opinion that the system administrator that dealt with this disaster pulled off nothing short of a miracle in pulling all the data back together with disk recovery software, restoring other data from backups, and showing an incredible amount of courage and patience where others may have just walked away and started over.
The lesson here is pointed. No matter how many tape storage vaults you have, or how often you backup, a hardware failure that causes data loss can leave you in a situation that is nothing short of a melt down. And your disaster recovery program is going to fall short in being able to recover 100% of your lost data. So even if you have a moderately busy E-commerce site, you are facing lost sales, and worse, loss of your customer’s confidence. In a more critical situation, where you perhaps have an online application that is constantly writing accounting data, or surveys, a hardware failure resulting in data loss will have even the most level headed system administrators and hard core business people weak in the knees and groveling for their customer’s forgiveness.
While NetTrac’s default hosting service includes an exhaustive regimen of backups for all of our hosting customers and various hosting platforms, we, like everyone else, have been vexed by the ramifications possible data loss between scheduled backups. We have been constantly on the lookout for a reliable and cost effective solution. Block level backup technology seems to be the fresh answer to an old problem. Read on.
The Solution
Recently and luckily, there have been a handful of software companies that have pushed backup technology to the bleeding edge and produced a method of doing continuous block level backups. While the ability to read disk data blocks en masse has been around for a long time, it is only recently that it has been developed into a fully featured backup system. This technology has a few tremendous advantages over the traditional file based backup. Firstly, as it reads disk blocks and clusters directly off the disk volume, it is incredibly fast. Also, digital logging of disk blocks keeps track of what blocks have changed and which have remained unwritten making continuous incremental backups of large disks highly efficient. The restore of large data repositories can now take minutes rather than hours. Benchmarking tests show that the data from a near-full 160 Gigabit hard drive can be restored in a matter of minutes. It is also possible to take disk snapshots of entire data structures every few minutes maximizing restore capability. Further, those companies that are truly offering continuous block level backups have dispensed with data de-duplication algorithms. (Often used in conventional file level backup systems to save space on media as well as reduce read/write times. Traditionally this was based on the premise that, since many identical files can be scattered across a data system, only one backup of such a file is required. This can cause serious headaches when you are trying to restore a system disk and files required by the operating system are not where they are supposed to be.) With block level backups this saving is not required as data is read, deltas computed, backups written all at disk speed. “Directory transversal times” on data reads and writes are completely eliminated. The result is that restored data is complete and accurate in every detail.
But the real “bonus” is that the backup process runs continuously, working away in the background, taking the changed data from your hard drive and safely tucking it away. So, if the worst happens, you may lose a couple minutes of data rather than the hours of data that has changed since your last “regular” backup finished in the middle of “last night". Overall, this is a great step forward in data protection and data recovery.
Many of these products come pre-licensed for data base backups aside being packed with lots of useful tools. Some have been designed specifically for the Microsoft Exchange server platform so that a data loss does not mean you have lost everyone’s mail from the day of the failure. These applications are designed particularly to work with the special data format of the mail stores and databases so that recovery of complicated data structures, such as in Microsoft Exchange, is normally flawless.
Leveraging Block Level Continuous Backups to Protect Your Data:
Make it a Part of Your Corporate Continuity Plan
We are pleased to announce that NetTrac is now making available, to its mission critical application and dedicated hosting customers, Block Level Continuous Backups of data stores or entire systems. This technology allows us to add to our arsenal of high end solutions aimed at providing more peace of mind to those whose data is mission critical. It is our hope you will take advantage of this product and utilize its benefits to protect your business interests against lost data. Now for less than a dollar a day, you will never be caught having lost a day’s work in data, or critical sales information, or data belonging to your customers. A dollar a day allows you continuously backup 100 gigabytes of data and store it across multiple network attached storage devices that are part of our network.
Our Continuous Data Protection offering comes with access to your own control panel so that you can manage users, schedule tasks, configure compression, setup backup parameters, configure mail alerts, browse files and folders in your backup, set logging levels, review system events and most importantly, with the click of your mouse, do restores and do them incredibly fast!! The list goes on from here. Overall, this product is the "must have" solution for anyone who has ever worried about their data or thought about how bad things would be if disaster strikes.
NetTrac’s CDP (Continuous Data Protection) Service is now available to our data center collocation and dedicated hosting customers. It will also be made available to our shared hosting customers that have a legitimate need for continuous backups. This service will not be available as an“online backup service” outside our data center or network infrastructure.
Dedicated hosting and collocation customers that wish to know more about NetTrac CDP Services and how you can get started, should send inquires through our “Contact Us” page or email NetTrac/CDP. Network support customers that wish to improve their onsite backup technology should email support@nettrac.net
If you are not a NetTrac customer but are interested in Continuous Data Protection, give us a call or use any of the the links above to find out how NetTrac can safely and cost effectively house your application and mission critical data. You will be pleasantly surprised how affordable high quality solutions can be.
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