Disaster Planning: Online, Offsite and Out of Sight, Could the Internet Be the Future of Data Backup?
By Tim Rowan, Home Care Automation
LET'S PLAY A LITTLE GAME:
Suppose you had to pick between these two data backup scenarios. You do not know, or care for now, which one costs more so base your choice on anything but price.
Scenario 1:
Your network application and file servers are backed up to a standard tape drive every night. In the mornings, it is your job to remove one or many tapes from their drive(s) and examine log files to make sure the previous night’s backup(s) completed without errors. When that is done, you transport the tapes to an off-site location or prepare them for pickup by a courier service. When the courier swaps your fresh tapes for another set of tapes from your offsite rotation system on the same trip, you insert them into the proper drives, either immediately or at quitting time.
You have previously checked into the safety and security of the offsite tape storage service, which replaced your pre-HIPAA offsite storage site, your bedroom dresser drawer. The courier and offsite storage facility are well worth their monthly fee, considering the peace of mind that accompanies knowing your data is housed in a fireproof building behind a hefty lock.
Once a month, or perhaps quarterly, depending on the policy specified in your company's disaster recovery manual, you perform a practice restore from tape to disk to validate your backups. The practice also serves to refresh your own memory of the steps involved to perform a restore so that you can do it efficiently should the need arise to do it under the pressure of an emergency. This does not have to be a complete restore, as data on tapes can be presumed valid if just a few files restore properly. However, it must be done in such a way that it does not overwrite new files with older ones of the same name. This means your periodic test restore must be done between the time overnight backups finish and the first person comes to work the next morning.
Once a year or so, you purchase new tapes to replace existing ones before they wear out and become less reliable. Once or twice a year, you train someone else to perform this daily routine so you can go on vacation.
Scenario 2:
You contract with an online, offsite backup service and pay their monthly fee. Your network connects to the service's network through a broadband connection. Backups initiate automatically, either nightly or several times per day, depending on choices you have set up via a web-based application. Your data is encrypted and transmitted to two redundant, secure locations in two different parts of the country, on servers behind bank-vault-like doors that can only be opened with handprint recognition.
When a minor emergency occurs, such as an accidentally deleted file, you go online, locate the most recent version of the file and restore it through the same broadband connection. When a moderate emergency occurs, such as a server crash, you replace the hardware and operating system and then re-image the new hard drive(s) from the remote backup servers, again using a web application. When a fire, hurricane or earthquake hits and it may be days or weeks before your servers are replaced and your building is inhabitable, your patient data can be accessed through the Internet as soon as you can get to a working, connected computer.
Made your choice yet?
If so, now is the time to learn that the cost of each scenario is about the same. Of course, the direct, out-of-pocket costs of Scenario 2, mostly in the form of a monthly fee, are much higher. However, it is legitimate to subtract certain avoided hard and soft costs when calculating the newer technology's relative ROI. Tangibles would include the courier service fee, periodic backup software and drive upgrades and the cost of occasionally replacing tape cartridges themselves. Significant intangibles include daily IT department time and potential staff downtime. (Products to recolor management personnel's rapidly-graying hair are significant but not allowable expenses for the purposes of this comparison.)
Early adopters: two stories
Yossi Akselrud cut his home care teeth on a scenario much like our Scenario 1 when he became IT Director at Brooklyn's Revival Home Healthcare. He convinced his company to switch to an offsite backup system from a Pennsylvania company, BitLeap, in the middle of 2005. Asked to describe how his life has changed, he begins his story at home, not at work.
"I literally used to wake up with nightmares," he told HCAR, "thinking about that backup tape sitting there all night in the same room as the server it was protecting, vulnerable to the same disasters that might destroy the server itself." Since outsourcing his backups, not only Akselrud's sleeping pattern but his daytime routine has changed as well.
"Major disasters are rare, of course," he continued, "but minor problems happen with some regularity. If an important file is corrupted or accidentally deleted, either my old tape system or my new online system would restore it, of course, but it used to take me a good 45 minutes and now it takes about two. I had to determine the file's originating folder, locate the correct tape and then perform the restore. By far, the bulk of that 45 minutes was spent finding the right tape. Now, I go to the web application from wherever I am, tell it to search for the most recent version of the file and issue the restore command."
The service Revival Home Healthcare uses from BitLeap features a backup appliance, the "Leap Server," that attaches to the network directly from within Akselrud's server room. Most restores, though initiated via BitLeap's web-based application, are performed locally from that device, which can be equipped with hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Redundant offsite storage of backups, co-located on servers inside secure buildings in Southfield, Michigan and Ashburn, Virginia, are only needed if the onsite appliance is damaged or made inaccessible following a major disaster.
Across a couple of rivers, in Washington, New Jersey, Akselrud's counterpart at the Warren County Public Health Nursing Agency, Karen Frutchey, tells much the same story. The only difference is that she is more of a counterpart by title than by training. The county-owned home care provider does not employ an IT department or even a full-time IT person. Frutchey manages a network and its applications between her office manager duties, relying on support from billing software vendor FGA, Inc. and point-of-care vendor Thornberry, Ltd.
"So much has changed since we outsourced," Frutchey explained. "We really do not need a professional IT person on staff to manage our backups. I learned how to use the web-based control application fairly easily. If we have a problem that can be resolved by restoring a file, I can do it in just a few minutes."
That confidence was put to the test recently. The county home care agency experienced a sudden, complete server crash. "I know it wasn't like a fire or a hurricane or anything," Frutchey began her horror story, "but it was enough to shut us down for two days." About 47 of those 48 hours to which she refers were spent acquiring a new server and installing a network operating system on it. Once connected to the Leap Server, the new hard drive was restored with applications and data in minutes. A tape system would have taken hours, including someone to babysit the process and change tapes when necessary.
Founded in 2002 and located in central Pennsylvania, BitLeap has installations in a number of home care agencies. Its market across all types of industries has grown to include 30 states, with contracts pending in England and China. "We did things backward from conventional entrepreneurial wisdom," admits CEO Guy Suter. "My partners and I did not encounter a problem and develop a solution in response, we found a new technology that we all wanted to work with and then went in search of a way to use it."
Suter and partners Ian Berry and Lindsay Snider met while working for a regional ISP. Berry and Snider are the technologists; Suter brought marketing expertise to the venture. What the team developed was a way to manipulate files on the bit level, Suter explained. Consequently, the system can perform live backups during the work day, even on files locked for use, without doing damage to the file or interfering with the worker. Using "bit-differential analysis," the system can backup selected portions of large data files when only that portion has been changed.
During the workday, the inhouse backup appliance can copy every file, all day, as soon as it is changed, should the user select the highest security setting. Or it can be set to run only once per day. Either way, backups are uploaded to offsite, secure servers after work hours. In an environment where uploads must be done more frequently, transfer rates can be throttled down to avoid hogging external bandwidth during work hours. Revival's backups, for example, are scheduled to initiate every evening at 8:00; Warren County's run at 1:00 and 10:00 AM and 1:00 and 4:00 PM.
The second feature so highly regarded by both Revival's Akselrud and Warren County's Frutchey is BitLeap's web-based application. It reports backup date and time and any unexpected failures, allowing users to check on the status of their backups through the Internet from any connected computer. "At the end of every backup session," Suter continued, "the application generates a report showing all files that had changed since the last backup session and confirming that they were backed up."
Both users interviewed for this story had a hard time containing their enthusiasm for offsite backup technology. Both swear they would never go back to tape. "I can be home taking a sick day," Akselrud related one more example, "log in to view backup reports, download and test one file, and restore it if necessary."
Learning about BitLeap's data transfer system and having its storage facility described originally convinced Akselrud. Data is first compressed using 256-bit AES encryption, an algorithm designated by the National Security Administration (NSA) as suitable for top secret government transmissions, and then sent via an encrypted tunnel through the Internet to servers in the two redundant facilities in Michigan and Virginia, facilities that also serve customers such as the FBI and Google. Each features backup generators and hand-scan entry systems.
Bottom line: can I afford it?
This particular outsource backup service is priced as a monthly fee based on amount of storage space used. Therefore, the rate will vary considerably from small customers to large but Suter was able to offer a typical range. "Most home care customers should be able to use our services for between $50 and $100 per month," he estimated.