Tag Archives: MSP TSM

01.23.14
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Can the Data Remain Within the Customer’s Control While Data Backup and Recovery is Moved to the Cloud?

Nine out of ten global CEOs view the cloud as critical to their business plans according to IBM.

Junior technician learning Data backupIt is no surprise that IBM Pulse 2014 is shaping up to be another very successful conference. Pulse is IBM’s premier cloud conference. It is being held in Las Vegas on February 23rd through the 26th.

The conference will be covering the power of cloud computing. Included in this discussion are Managed Service Providers (MSP), from cloud and storage to traditional data center, managed network services, and mobile device management. Eighty-five percent of new software this year will be built for cloud delivery.

When the term “cloud” is mentioned, most of us visualize a specific service  that we are familiar. We also visualize that service to be all-inclusive. An example would be data backup and recovery where all the data and the processes are expected to be deployed in the cloud. But, this is not the only model that is possible. A hybrid model may be the preferred in certain cases.

In the case of data backup and recovery, for instance, the data can remain within the customer’s network and deployed off site at the customer’s choice location, while the processes are managed in the cloud. The benefit gained by deploying the data backup processes in the cloud is having the management of the data backup and recovery performed and scheduled remotely by data consultants that specialize in this field. An additional benefit is to remove the burden from the already stretched IT staff.

As we have discussed in previous posts, the alternative of moving the process of data backup and recovery to the cloud is all too often to pick the most junior IT professional on staff and assign that person the task of data backup processes. Picking a junior person for this task  ‘ticks the box’ for upper management and all is well. That is until disaster strikes and that data needs to be recovered. This is to say nothing of the daily and weekly inefficiencies that can be caused by data backup processes developed by an inexperienced individual.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting a DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes.

01.10.14
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What Considerations Need to be Made When Backing Up Encrypted Data

As we stated in previous posts on this Blog, the complexity of data is increasing. We have recognized and highlighted that business data is no longer of a traditional structured type.

Encrypted DataAnother consideration besides data type is when any of these many types of data are encrypted. Then the question arises “what needs to be done when encrypted data needs to be backed?”

As explained by IBM’s Technote FAQ, the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) client makes no special provision for data on a machine that has been previously encrypted. From the perspective of Tivoli Storage Manager there is no difference between the encrypted data and plain text.

The Tivoli Storage Manager client configuration can be setup to encrypt its own data stream to the Tivoli Storage Manager server. In this case Tivoli Storage Manager will take the data as it exists on the client and encrypt it and store it in the Tivoli Storage Manager server in its own encrypted format. So, if the data has been previously encrypted, Tivoli Storage Manager will encrypt the data again using its own encryption method, and store this in the server. If it needs to be restored, Tivoli Storage Manager decrypts the data back to its original form. The third-party program will then be needed to decrypt that result and bring it back to its plain format.

There are special considerations that have to be made when encrypting data during the backup process to ensure the recovery is successful. For more details and special considerations, refer to the IBM’s Technote FAQ  or Backing up AIX encrypted files on this subject specific to TSM.

Salvus Data Consultants understand complex data issues. Salvus provides a unique data backup and recovery model by offering TSM remotely through the cloud for their clients while the data remains under the client’s control on the client’s servers and backup sites. If you have further questions on this subject, Salvus can be reached at 903-201-7233.

01.01.14
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Data Backup and Recovery Considerations for Hadoop and Big Data

IBM says that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. IBM  also says that 80% of data captured today is unstructured. Sources of unstructured data are, among others, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, point-of-sale systems. All of this unstructured data can be termed as Big Data.

Salvus Data ConsultantsBecause of the wide-ranging benefits that small and medium size businesses can gain from Big Data in today’s competitive world, many are implementing a local Big Data strategy. To help businesses of all sizes manage Big Data, there is Hadoop. The Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

The Hadoop project has various elements. Below are a few of the more pertinent :

  • Hadoop Common – libraries and utilities
  • Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) – a distributed file-system that stores data on commodity servers while providing high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
  • Hadoop MapReduce – The “Map” step takes the input, divides it into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes.  The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes it to its master node. The “Reduce” step then collects the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them to form the output.

As stated by Nathan Coutinho in his CDW Blog article  5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Data Center for Big Data “The whole point of Hadoop is to keep the data local on commodity servers and economical local storage…”

Small and Medium size businesses find Hadoop attractive because of it ability to provide high availability to data on local commodity servers.

A data strategy is never complete without a Data Backup and Recovery strategy. A Big Data implementation using Hadoop presents a need for even more focus on the ability to recover from a catastrophic event quickly. However, the SMB is not often staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity.  The other consideration is that since the attractiveness of Hadoop is to use local servers, there is a further need to implement a data backup and recover strategy that can be managed remotely but not have a requirement that the live data be transferred to or running in a cloud environment.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting an DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes. Additionally, the SMB can have a comprehensive Data Backup and Recovery strategy while housing their Big Data locally.