Data backups, made largely to tapes, are one area of technology that has not changed much since the early days of computing. The backup procedures previously in place at Cisco® development offices would be familiar to any IT professional with a local tape backup system, or to anyone who regularly handles tapes and system maintenance.
However, the use of local tape backup methods became increasingly impractical at Cisco. Local backup systems were aging and required more maintenance and repairs. Additionally, the backup tasks were often handled by a local engineer, which took away from valuable development time.
Server-to-Disk Backup over the Network
A Cisco IT project team was formed to identify a new solution for data backup and recovery, replacing tape systems with disk storage. This team identified a design to automate backups by connecting local servers to central disk storage systems over the Cisco network. To implement this design, Cisco IT is deploying the EMC Avamar backup software at 30 remote sites worldwide.
At the local sites, the backup software is installed on servers in a grid computing design to provide local data replication. The backup process also communicates with the central disk systems (housed in a Cisco data center) over the Cisco network, replicating data from the local site each day. Within the data center, the replicated data is transferred monthly to tape for long-term, offsite storage.
“We’ve designed the backup storage periods incrementally, with backup data available on the local system for eight weeks and from the central storage systems for one year,” says Rich Sanders, a member of the project team. “This design makes both data backup and retrieval much faster and easier, and we will rarely need to restore data from the tapes.”
Simple Network Configuration, Low Bandwidth Demand
“We want to ensure that the backup procedure does not affect production traffic on the Cisco network, regardless of traffic levels or time of day,” says William Bloom, a Cisco IT project manager. “Although the backup process runs during the business day at most locations, there is no impact on users because of how that traffic is transferred over the Cisco network.”
The replication traffic is marked as “scavenger” class for quality of service purposes on the Cisco network, which means it receives any network bandwidth available after allocations are made to higher-priority applications. In addition, the backup software performs data compression and eliminates duplicate data before transfer, which reduces requirements for WAN bandwidth and disk storage capacity.
The local and central data backups also simplify and reduce the time involved in restoring data to local systems. “Fast data recovery is essential to Cisco’s business continuity strategy,” says Bloom. “Restoring data from a central system over the network can be done in minutes, compared to the hours it can take to retrieve and restore data using offsite backup tapes. This design is especially valuable for Cisco IT’s business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.”
Lower Costs and Improved Backups
By managing backup activity at the data center and using the network to automate data replication to disk-based systems, Cisco IT expects to realize the following benefits:
- Reduce overall cost of backups by eliminating the need for backup libraries and tapes in remote offices.
- Eliminate backup tasks for local staff because all backup systems are now managed and maintained centrally.
- Automate and centralize backup with no changes to the Cisco network or IT systems.
- Faster data restoration times because data is replicated on multiple systems—local, central, and tape—and faster retrieval from disk than tape.
- Fewer backup failures because of the dual replication to local and central disk systems.
- Future capabilities such as replication of stored data between Cisco data centers for greater redundancy and user features for restoring their own data.
“When you are in a situation where you need to retrieve data from a backup, you want to give users their data quickly,” says Sanders. “The Cisco network makes it feasible to provide fast access to both local and central backups.”
For More Information
Cisco on Cisco
Cisco IT Business Resilience Case Study
Cisco Enterprise WAN Solutions