CIOs and their senior leadership teams know that the existing model of backup is consuming them with day-to-day tactical problems. Research confirms that this experience is widespread and indicates that it will lead to major change in the next two years.

Gartner reports that by 2013:

• At least 30 percent of organizations will have changed their primary backup vendor due to frustration over cost, complexity, or capability.
• Fifty percent of midsize organizations will have implemented tiered recovery architectures.
• More than 75 percent of large enterprises will have made similar changes to eliminate their outdated and burdensome backup windows.

Now that server virtualization technologies have been proven in many environments, more people are looking at virtualization to improve the efficiency of their primary workloads in the data center. Despite the realized benefits from virtualizing non-mission-critical applications, two questions remain on the minds of IT professionals. One, since traditional backup doesn’t work in virtual environments, how can I effectively protect virtualized workloads? We are talking mission-critical applications here! Two, I know how I reduced my server infrastructure with virtualization, but I also know how my storage cost went way up as a result. So how can I reduce my storage costs while implementing server virtualization?

In a recent report from ESG on the “Impact of Server Virtualization on Data Protection,” when asked about top server virtualization initiatives for 2010, most respondents placed backup, recovery, and replication right after virtualizing more workloads. It is very well understood that server virtualization breaks traditional backup processes. The consolidation of servers and workloads is leaving very little resources for backup applications to perform data copies. In virtual server environments, CPU utilization climbs to more than 60 to 70 percent, up from an average of 20 percent in physical environments, leaving very little for the most demanding job of them all, backup. In addition network resource utilization is increased to such a degree that very little bandwidth remains for massive data transfers required by backup operations.

Tape! Well, I talked about broken backup in my last post, but I didn’t mention tape as one of the reasons that backup is broken. Tape remains a form of media that has it applications. There is no way will you will hear me saying that “tape sucks” – I’d even say that any one claiming that has no idea where tape fits into the enterprise, is clueless, or at best “sucks at tape” and doesn’t know how to use it.

Tape has served us beyond its primary mission in the traditional sense of backup. At the risk of stating the obvious, tape was the target and the source of recovery; but it also became the means for data mobility and, in many cases, the transport layer for data migration. Tape offered an encapsulation for data, systems, and entire workloads that was not possible otherwise. And, beyond that, it was the destination of archived data.

Data protection can be interpreted in so many ways today; there is a lack of consensus on where the technology should go and how it should evolve. Where should it apply? And how can we adapt to new technologies such as virtualization or adopt others such as cloud services?

To their credit, the guys at Wikibon started a community project around this same subject, “The Future of Data Protection - How Cloud Computing and Virtualization Change Everything,” and I encourage the participation of all platform, storage, and data protection vendors as well as the end users who consume the technology. This will be my first blog on this topic and attempt to contribute to the discussion.

I don’t think I need to repeat the fact that traditional backup is broken, but I just did! There are three main reasons that lead to this statement: exponential data growth, server virtualization, and unacceptable recovery times. In this post, I’ll expand only on these three reasons, and I will address available technologies and the future of data protection in future blogs.