Backups don’t always complete and restores don’t always work. Remember that backup serves as your last line of defence. Automate these processes wherever possible.īest Practices for Datacenter Design to Reduce Dependence on Backup Start up the restored system(s) and verify that they can operate as desired. Remember that a restore test goes beyond your backup application’s green checkmark. Test restores help to uncover problems in media and misjudgments in RTOs and RPOs. Even if you know the routine, that does not guarantee the validity of the data. If you have not restored your backup data, then you do not know if you can restore it. Timing depends on your organization’s flux, but do not allow reviews to occur less than annually. Prepare yourself by scheduling frequent reviews. Even if it can’t fool you, it can fool someone. But, six months later, some of it will puzzle even you. Your design will make so much sense when you build it that you’ll wonder how anyone would struggle to understand it. If the primary data and its replica exist in substantially distant geographic regions, they help protect against natural disasters and other major threats to physical systems. If one copy of your data is good, two is better. The notification configuration in Altaro VM Backup looks like this: Minimally, configure to receive error notifications. That way, if you don’t get the expected message, you’ll know that your backup system has a failure. However, even when it successfully retries, it still must make you aware of a failure so that you can identify and correct any small problems before they turn into show-stoppers. Ideally, you can automate the backup system to continue trying when it encounters a problem. You need to know immediately if a backup process fails. RTOs control their speed and resiliency needs. RPOs dictate how much space capacity your backup infrastructure requires. Consider your Internet and WAN link speeds when preparing for cloud or offsite backup. Do not make assumptions have an understanding of your total bandwidth requirements during backup windows. If that applies to you, you won’t need to architect anything special to carry your backup data. Most networks operate at a low level of utilization. You do not want to face a long capital request process, or worse, denial, if you run out of capacity. If you don’t have enough data for calculated estimates, then make your best guess. If you already perform trend analysis on your data and systems, you can leverage that to predict backup needs into the future. Your data becomes excessively vulnerable whenever the backup system fails, so keep its uptime as close to 100% as your situation allows. When possible, avoid single points of failure in your backup infrastructure. Over time, repetitive manual tasks tend to be skipped, forgotten, or performed improperly. Whether you create a diagram does not matter as much as your ability to understand your infrastructure from the perspective of backup.Ĭonsider these best practices while designing your backup infrastructure: In all other cases, use the most generic category possible. Some systems have more particular requirements from your backup application, such as e-mail. A “Client Endpoint” almost falls into the “File Endpoint”, except that you can never guarantee its availability. A “File Endpoint” label could refer to a standard file server, or it could mean any application server that works with VSS and requires no other special handling. Think of systems to back up as “endpoints”, following the categorization of your backup system. Visualize your backup infrastructure as a standalone design: Not understanding backup as a component can lead to architectural mistakes that cost time, money, and sometimes data. Sometimes, that obscures its unique identity. Your backup infrastructure exists inextricably among the rest of your system. Best Practices for Backup Infrastructure Design This article covers several considerations and activities to optimize backup strategy, planning, and scheduling. You won’t find any “one size fits all” solution to data protection due to the uniqueness of datasets, even within the same company. Check out this Altaro article for Defining the Recovery Time (RTO / RTA) and Recovery Point (RPO / RPA) for your Business (also Backup Bible). To properly plan your backup schedule, you need to know your loss tolerances (RPO) and the amount of downtime that you can withstand (RTO). Permanent data loss or exposure can destroy a business. The constant threats of ransomware and data breaches place even greater urgency on the vital practice of backup strategy.
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