Data protection and backups are extremely critical in any environment, no matter if they are located in the main data center or business-critical resources and data located in edge environments. This includes Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) environments. There is certainly a trend in today’s enterprise environments to place workloads closer to the edge due to performance and many other IoT use cases. Businesses today are certainly in need of thinking about their data protection and backups in ROBO environments and what this will entail.
Let’s take a look at the topic of data protection and backups in ROBO environments and see how your business can successfully design a backup strategy for this particular use case.
Data Protection and Backups in ROBO Environments
There are special considerations that must be made when it comes to ROBO environment in general, including the strategy to provide data protection and backups in the environment. ROBO environments by their very nature are more limited in several key areas when compared to the central office or headquarters. This includes limitations on the compute, storage, and network components as well as connectivity back to the main office.
Backup and recovery can be a challenge in these ROBO environments due to these limiting factors. Additionally, with the remote nature of the ROBO environments, often, issues with backups can go unnoticed with the lack of experienced IT staff onsite. Failing to test the validity of backups, especially at ROBO locations can result in corrupt backups going unnoticed.
With these aforementioned factors considered, what are some key areas that your business needs to take into consideration when looking at data protection and backups in ROBO environments? Let’s consider the following key considerations and strategies:
- Centralized or Localized Backups
- Data Storage Strategies
- Offsite Copy or No Offsite Copy?
- Limited Network Bandwidth
- Using Cloud Backups with ROBO
Let’s see how each of these considerations and strategies weighs into data protection and backups in ROBO environments.
Centralized or Localized Backups
One of the first key considerations for building a ROBO backup strategy is deciding on where your data is going to be, whether or not you are going to utilize a centralized backup strategy or a localized backup strategy. What are the differences between these two approaches? What are the considerations between the two?
For businesses that already have a backup solution already in place, generally, this means you already have a central storage location being utilized for backups as well as the physical infrastructure making this possible, including compute and storage. This also includes centralized management of the solution through a common management interface. For environments with an existing centralized solution, simply connecting in ROBO locations to the centralized data protection and backup solution can be the easiest approach from both a physical hardware and management perspective.
With the centralized approach, it is extremely important to make sure you have the network bandwidth between the ROBO location and the central office to allow the transferring of backup data on top of regular business as usual network traffic. This is a requirement that may often be overlooked when considering a centralized solution. On paper, without any other traffic, it might appear that the available network bandwidth would have no problem carrying the backup traffic. However, the impact on production business-critical traffic can potentially be dramatic.
Additionally, with centralized backups, restore times will be much longer as restore operations will be pulling data across the WAN link between the central office and the ROBO location.
Localized backups are much more feasible for businesses who may not already have a structured data protection solution in place or where network bandwidth between the ROBO and central office is so limited, backups between the two would not be possible.
With localized backups, additional challenges may arise with the management of the solution as well as offsite copies. With the centralized approach, the data is stored offsite by default. With the localized solution, offsite copies need to be strongly considered.
Localized copies will also require more hardware as the required components needed for backups local to the ROBO site will need to be provisioned. This will incur more costs from a hardware perspective than the centralized backup model.
Data Storage Strategies
There are many aspects of data storage strategies that need to be considered. Often, in ROBO environments, the hardware is in short supply. Storing backup data in the ROBO location will mean thinking about storage strategies for the local site.
While it is common in ROBO environments to consolidate roles and workloads if at all possible, backups should never be stored on the same production storage infrastructure that backs your production workloads. You don’t want to be in the “all eggs in one basket” scenario with both production data and backups. Storing backups outside of the production environment is a wise choice.
Each business and ROBO environment is different. It is certainly a business decision to determine how critical the data is that exists in ROBO environments. The degree to which backup data is separated from production may depend on the criticality of the data that is protected.
While encryption of your backups should be a best practice standard being followed for any backups, it becomes increasingly important in ROBO environments that are often less secure and less monitored. Security of your data should always be considered and thought through.
With both centralized and localized backups, compression and deduplication should be used to increase the efficiency of the storage space used for backup data stored on disk.
Offsite Copy or No Offsite Copy?
It is mentioned briefly above, however, the localized storage of your backups in a ROBO location means you need to think about offsite copies. There are really a couple of approaches here that make sense depending on the resources you have available to you in the ROBO location.
Offsite copies can be taken care of feasibly by introducing backup to tape for offsite storage, or by way of copying backups asynchronously via the network offsite. The latter option involving offsite copies means you need to have the bandwidth available to do this.
Tape backups require no network bandwidth but introduce a higher level of complexity as someone will have to be onsite to change out tapes at regular intervals. This doesn’t necessarily need to be IT personnel as other office staff with the right training can effectively change tapes out as well. This point needs to be considered however as it is part of the overall considerations for ROBO backup design.
Limited Network Bandwidth
Limited Network Bandwidth will shape the options chosen for ROBO data protection and backups. This may make the decision on whether or not centralized or localized backups are used. It may also determine the options for offsite copies.
When it comes to limited network bandwidth, technology solutions can be used to offset the limited bandwidth available. These include technologies like:
- Changed Block Tracking – Only changes to data are tracked and copied over
- WAN optimization and acceleration – Block tracking and efficiencies introduced at the WAN level for data copies
- Bandwidth throttling – Throttle backup traffic so that it never exceeds a predefined amount
- Scheduling – By scheduling backup copies/backups so that they do not interfere with production traffic, limited bandwidth can be used effectively and efficiently with much less impact
Using Cloud Backups with ROBO
Many of the same considerations with centralized backups apply to cloud backups as well. Often, network bandwidth will most likely be the determining factor. Cloud provides a great alternative for storing offsite copies of backups. However, there will be a cost in terms of network bandwidth that must be considered with cloud backups.
Additionally, will third-party solutions be used? Does your current backup solution have a cloud offering? Will you “roll your own” cloud solution for backups? These and other questions will apply to consider the cloud as a viable option.
Wrapping Up
ROBO environments present unique challenges when it comes to data protection and backups. Thinking through the design of protecting your ROBO environments is vitally important to ensure your data is protected while at the same time not impacting production.
Considering designs involving centralized and localized storage, data storage strategies, offsite copies, limited network bandwidth, and using cloud technologies allows architecting the best data protection and backup solution for ROBO environments.
It is important to use backup technologies and solutions that can work with your strategy to protect your ROBO environment. Vembu BDR Suite has all the features needed to support all of your ROBO backup strategies. You can download a fully-featured trial version of Vembu BDR Suite here and test it in your own ROBO environment to start taking advantage of its features.
Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more.
