The digital format of the VTL also provides easy access to individual files for restoration.Īnother benefit of the VTL is the ease with which you can create a second copy of your data (an immutable copy) at an offsite location. One of first benefits companies see is the fact that the VTL will provide a significantly faster backup and recovery process than magnetic tape, reducing system downtime for backups and speeding your recovery in the event of a disaster. There are several benefits to making the move to a VTL. When we talk to customers that want to move away from traditional magnetic tape backup, this is typically the route we discuss. Your Power System will “see” the VTL like it does a traditional tape backup system. Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL): A Big Improvement Over Physical Tapeįor those not familiar with VTLs, a VTL is simply a disk-based backup system that emulates physical tapes. Test the restore process so you know how long it takes and if you will be able to meet your recovery time objective. While incremental backups to the cloud may not take long to execute, if you needed to perform a full recovery of terabytes of data it might take longer than expected. One word of caution as you start looking at solutions that get your data offsite, investigate whether you will have a local backup copy or not. So, depending on how you deploy your cloud backup solution, it could enable you to meet the 3-2-1 best practices backup standard. This offsite copy can be stored at a single location, or multiple locations depending on what services your provider offers. With this solution, you will typically install an agent on your LPAR that creates a local backup copy and then pushes that copy offsite per your schedule. This low number seems to hold true with the companies I talk to as I seldom run into companies backing up IBM Power Systems to the cloud. The IBM i 2022 Marketplace report indicated that 11 percent of companies plan to recover from a disaster with cloud backups. The cloud provides companies with an easily accessible solution for getting that backup data offsite. It is not uncommon to see backup tapes stored in the same room or building as the production systems. One of the biggest mistakes I see companies making with their backup solution is not getting their backup to a secure, offsite location. While this is “the old standby” approach, there are better options out there. The team responsible for backups further exacerbates the problems with magnetic tape and the risks by not storing them in ideal conditions (temperature and humidity controlled), reusing tapes for years on end and simply trusting that the data will be there when needed versus testing the recovery process. With magnetic tape it is also slow to find data on the tape and difficult to recover specific or individual files. This means that your system will be down longer each night while you perform backups and in the event a recovery is required it will take longer to restore the data. And while you can’t argue with “easy” it’s a solution full of short comings.įor starters magnetic tape is slow for performing backups and slow for restoring data. The technology has been around for years, their solution was implemented long ago, it’s relatively inexpensive to maintain and once it’s setup anyone can change tapes and keep it running. It’s safe to say that most companies we talk to are using magnetic tape as their backup solution. When I visit companies and talk to them about their backup strategies, very few are meeting the 3-2-1 best practices. This requires that you have 3 copies of your data on 2 different media with 1 of them being offsite. One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 best practices for backups. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy? Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. IBM Power: How Strong Is Your Backup Game?
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