Storage is critical enterprise infrastructure, and how best to protect these environments to ensure the safety and recovery of the data that resides there is pretty darn important. But is this sometimes a bit overlooked by enterprise architects thinking more about big-picture strategies than nitty-gritty details?

Perhaps. Consider, for example, that physical to virtual infrastructure transitions present the best chance nearly any organization will have for some time to rearchitect its backup methodology, says Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage Practice at TheInfoPro (a division of 451 Research). After all, a large-scale change like that doesn’t happen every day. You have to “exploit that opportunity, because you may not get it again for another 10 years,” he says.

Yet, when laying out the frameworks for physical to virtual infrastructure projects, most enterprise architects won’t have a ready answer about accomplishing backup redesign, he says. That has to change: Just as enterprise architects have a role in helping simplify server environments, so too should they play a part in reducing management overhead — i.e., the cost factor — for data protection. “This is a way of protecting the business; it’s not the business,” Coulter notes. “The time you spend doing this isn’t creating business value.” Yet, according to Storage Study Wave 15 done in 1H2011 by TheInfoPro, backup remains the largest storage time-sink (see chart below).

Complexity has had a long reign when it comes to storing, managing and protecting data, going back to the days of purely physical environments. Without guidance from enterprise architects, the addition of virtualization, on- and off-premises clouds, and SaaS solutions, can further complicate data management and protection — certainly during the period of time when organizations are transitioning to these new technologies and environments.    

David Liff, VP, Global Marketing, at CA Technologies, sees the enterprise architect as bringing the risk assessor’s eye to the job, to apply recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) principles appropriate to each specific business process, across whatever swaths of technology are in place or moving into place, and ideally enabling all protections via a single ergonomic console. “Architecting storage used to be about making sure you had enough storage and that it was working. That’s now a given,” he says. “Now it’s about driving risk management around storage architectures, based on the business process defining RPO and RTO.”

The amount of data the enterprise is willing to lose and the amount of time it is willing to wait to recover information depends on the impact that each specific loss-and-recovery effort will have on the business. It may be okay to lose a day’s worth of human resource transactions and to wait two weeks to recover HR data, but clearly it’s a very different story for the transactions and data involved with online trading system processes, for example. There, the requirement may be to restore back to just one minute or one transaction ago, and to do it instantly. While storage architects are themselves being asked to think more about protection according to RPO and RTO objectives, they should be defining those SLA goals in consultation with enterprise architects, Liff says.

Indeed, the enterprise architect should make it a point to be involved now more than ever. After all, enterprise architects regularly deal with governance issues, and increased regulatory and legal requirements — such as producing digital records in a timely manner as part of electronic discovery of evidence during litigation — demand good storage architecting and data protection practices. 

The enterprise architect also is needed now, more than ever, to help guide backup and recovery strategies because the enterprise has to move away from using many technology solutions to manage and protect distinct environments — physical, virtual, cloud — to a solution that can range across these platforms and across their various vendors, while seamlessly accommodating different business process Service Level Agreements. “That’s a challenge that creates churn,” Liff says. “Storage is known for high levels of complexity, and in large organizations you have teams of experts running different solutions, but their expertise is not portable. These teams are passionate about what they do and emotionally attached to what they know, too. Once you get to the business-driven goals of RTO and RPO, you need someone who’s outside of just the storage world — the enterprise architect — to decide what is the way forward to a more comprehensive solution that gives you granular control at a very high level.” (Today there are just a very few solutions that fit the bill, including CA Technologies’ ARCserve, he says.)

However you’re contemplating addressing storage in the new year, Coulter makes an important comment about getting these architectures right, especially in light of all the work most enterprises have been doing around server virtualization and the growth in capacity that that’s been driving. “Get it wrong and you will spend more and more on storage, and that eats into the savings [virtualization can deliver] on the server side,” he says.

How are you planning to help your enterprise get storage right?