The Planet Blog

In Know Thy Backups – Part I, we started discussing the most common strategies of backing up your data, and before we continue that discussion, I should clarify that we’re not talking about hardware configurations like RAID or backup products like Evault and Data Protection Servers. These backup schemes can be executed without spending a dime on additional equipment or resources. While there are best practices and recommendations for making backups and keeping them safe, if your budget is limited, you can protect and preserve your data using one of these schemes on your local workstation or on a secondary drive in your server.

When we looked at the full server and simple incremental backups in our previous post, we noticed a significant limitation: losing a single backup can be catastrophic to restoring data. In the next two schemes, we’ll evaluate solutions that protect us from this vulnerability.

Differential Incremental Backups

A differential scheme requires a full backup reference point and then makes a backup of all changes to the server from that reference point on each subsequent backup. This method requires more storage space than incremental backups but generally doesn’t need as much space as a full backup.

Based on the volume of changes made between the first backup, the reference point and the current backup, differential incremental backups may require additional server resources than an incremental backup. Simple and multi-level incremental backups constantly update the reference point with minimal load, while differential backups update the reference point with a new full backup.

Multi-level Incremental Backups

There’s a more granular and robust backup scheme that is less vulnerable than simple incremental backups and less server-intensive than differential backups: The multi-level incremental backup. Multi-level increments assign a level to each backup and then make a comparison against the last lower-level backup made. Only the changes between the reference point and the current data are saved.

This arrangement allows you to design a backup scheme around your needs and the capabilities of your server, and you can decide how many backups you will need for a full restoration to the latest restore point. You will control the number of backups required for a given restore by determining the number of levels in the system. In the event of a disaster, you need a single backup of each level, and each higher level backup must use the lower level as its reference point.

Choosing Your Backup Scheme

As I said in the beginning of this post, these backup schemes are available to you without the use of an additional server or any expensive backup management software. All of the above are viable options for making your backups; however, not every scheme is perfect for every situation. You should review your requirements and the available resources to determine which scheme best fits your needs.

-Ben

More often than not, server backups are misunderstood. With dozens of hardware options and hundreds of software options, finding the right backup can be intimidating. To assuage some of those fears and clear up a bit of that confusion, let’s go over a few of the most common backup schemes. This list isn’t all-inclusive, and the options presented shouldn’t be mistaken for backup plans. A backup scheme is simply a method of creating backups. A backup plan (or disaster recovery plan) is a scheduled implementation of a backup scheme. As we evaluate each scheme, we’ll look at the requirements, costs and benefits, and by the end of our tour, you can decide which best fits your business.

Before we get too far into the specifics of the different schemes, we should define some fundamental terms that we’ll use throughout the comparison:

• An archive is a set of data that is being preserved
• A reference point is a single archive against which comparisons are made
• A restore point is the most recent working backup

The key question a backup scheme answers is this: “If a server suffers a catastrophic failure, what is needed to resume operations with minimal downtime and data loss?” Again, the backup scheme is not a complete disaster recovery plan — its focus is the restoration of data.

The four basic backup schemes we’ll compare are full-server backups, simple incremental backups, multi-level incremental backups and differential incremental backups. The primary considerations about the method that should be used are the server load generated by the backup process, the backup file size, and the speed with which a backup can be restored.

Full Server Backups

A full server backup is one of the simplest methods for a backup scheme. It takes only a single backup archive to create a restore point, which makes data restoration simple and fast. The drawbacks are the amount of time it takes to make the backup, the load it generates, and the total size of the backup. Each backup scheme we’re comparing uses a full backup of the server.

As we evaluate the other schemes, you’ll note they all start with a full backup as a reference point, and create their own restore points as they move forward.

Simple Incremental Backups

A simple incremental backup attempts to resolve some of the issues with full backups, and it does a good job. With an incremental backup, a single full backup is made that serves as both a restore point and the initial reference point. On subsequent backups, it becomes a little more complex. Instead of making a new full backup when it is updated, this scheme compares the current state of the server against the state of the server as it was in the reference point (the first full backup). If it locates any changes, it backs up those changes and generates a new snapshot of the drive as another reference point. This new reference point is then used for the next incremental backup.

This backup structure means the restore point on a server with this backup will consist of the initial reference point and all subsequent incremental backups that use this reference point. This dependency is the primary weakness in simple incremental backups: All of the backups — from the original reference point to the incremental additions recording changes from the reference point — must be uncorrupted and complete for the backup to fully restore the data. If any backup is missing, corrupt or incomplete, the restoration can’t be completed.

The server load created and storage space required for this type of backup is generally less than what you’ll see in a full backup scheme, especially when there aren’t many differences between the backup point and the reference point. On the other side of the spectrum, if the entire data set changes between backups, the storage requirements and server load will be the same as they were when full backups were being performed.

There are two incremental backup schemes that attempt to address this issue: the differential and the multi-level incremental backup schemes. In Part II of “Know Thy Backups,” we’ll explain the pros and cons of these methods, and you’ll be ready to plan your backup strategy.

-Ben

The Planet has five core values. We are quizzed about them at companywide meetings, and they permeate our daily operations. I recently came across a passage when rereading “The Art of War” that may serve as a secondary set of core values for the team that handles The Planet’s new Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers offering:

Now there are five matters to which a general must pay strict heed. The first of these is administration; the second, preparedness; the third, determination; the fourth, prudence; and the fifth, economy.
– Wu Ch’i (430 – 381 BC)

Each one of the elements Wu mentions can be interpreted differently depending on the situation. Given that I work with the team that recently launched Alpha Professional, I can’t help but draw parallels. If you missed our press release on January 12, let me recap this new service offering:

Staffed around the clock (24×7) by dedicated and certified (RHCE, MCSE, CCNA) system administrators, The Planet has created a new business-class service offering that our clients have been asking for. The Alpha Professional feature set includes:

• First-call resolution: When you need a certified team of experts to take personal ownership of support incidents for your most important servers, Alpha Professional is ready to respond. You make one call, and the issue is resolved.
• One-hour hardware replacement Service Level Agreement (SLA): The Planet’s one-hour hardware replacement SLA provides you with peace of mind. If your server or any of its hardware components fail, we will replace them within one hour.
• Managed Backup: If you require a restore or you’d like to modify your backup scheduling, our team is available to assist you around the clock. Twenty GBs of high-availability redundant storage is included with Alpha Professional, and plug-ins for MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Exchange and SharePoint are available at no additional cost.
• Server Monitoring and Reaction: Our team of monitoring engineers is constantly on standby, watching for service notifications from your server. If a critical fault is detected any time of day, they immediately jump into action to resolve the service issue. In the event the service issue is lasting longer than anticipated, our team will reach out to your designated contact(s) to provide updates and guidance on a correct course of action and ETA on a resolution.

The Alpha Professional service package is available on virtual and private racks or on a per-server basis at $125 per server per month, so you can buy the service for the servers that are critical to your business. Other hosting providers require this kind of coverage on your entire installation, but we understand that you might not need us to monitor or run regular backups on your sandbox environments or your development servers, so you shouldn’t be required to add the service to those servers if it doesn’t fit your needs.

Managed Dedicated Servers or Managed Hosting?

So now we have Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers and Managed Hosting. They are two very distinct offerings linked by the generic-yet-fitting-in-both-cases term “managed” in their names. Managed Dedicated Servers is focused on your infrastructure. Managed Hosting is focused on your environment.

Managed Dedicated Servers ensure the uptime of your critical hosting infrastructure — including servers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. — and we allow you to manage everything from the operating system up.

Managed Hosting is a complete soup-to-nuts service offering in which your dedicated team has an intimate knowledge of your applications and databases. The Planet’s team will maintain a continuous conversation with you to tweak your systems, scale your installation and plan for the future. If you have database issues or you find your application is loading slowly, the Managed Hosting team will work through these issues with you. For a complete side-by-side breakdown of features by service type, visit http://www.theplanet.com/hosting-services/.

If you haven’t done so already, you can find complete information on Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers at http://www.theplanet.com/managed-dedicated-server/.

-Todd

Over the last few days, you may have read about a server’s complete data loss that resulted in the demise of blog hosting provider Journalspace.

In their assessment of the disaster, Journalspace found they had been replicating data to a second hard drive in their server via RAID to provide both backup and disaster recovery abilities. The data disaster occurred when the data on the first drive disappeared: this condition was immediately replicated to the second drive, resulting in total data loss. In turn, Journalspace users lost all their blog entries, ultimately leading to Journalspace’s decision to close its doors for good.

Now, it’s very easy to point the finger and say that these guys should have had a better backup strategy in place, but I’ll leave that to the experts on Slashdot … I’m more interested in using this as a proof point for the many hosting customers I know who are in the same position or worse – considering the fact that many don’t have even a second hard drive. If you are in this category, please use this as a cautionary tale, and let it remind you that you need a proper backup solution to protect your business.

A common misconception is that “real” backup solutions are prohibitively expensive. While the costs of storage solutions were relatively high in the past, prices have come down dramatically in recent years, which makes backup products correspondingly cheaper. Today you can have your data backed up – off your server – starting at just $5 a month.

It takes just one of these potential data-loss instances to make years of investing in a backup solution worthwhile.

Naturally, my preference would be that you buy a backup solution from The Planet. We have a range of competitively priced products and services for any size company. But really, I would prefer that you buy a backup solution from anywhere rather than stay unprotected … after all, the survival of your business could depend on how you decide to back up your server.

-Rob

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed an interesting trend: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

While I never questioned these assertions, I can’t say that I really investigated to see if Moore’s Law actually held true in the world of storage, especially with regard to the two key storage characteristics: capacity and throughput. Sure, prices for the same technology get lower over time – we all know that – but that’s just because no one wants the old stuff, right? Does Moore’s observation about the doubling of transistor density actually relate to hard drive capacities? What about throughput rates?

Once I started looking into historical storage-related statistics, it became clear that Moore’s Law doesn’t completely explain the evolution of storage technology. The primary driver for hard drive capacity – the disk’s areal density – has been increasing at 60 percent per year (or around 1.6x every two years), so that key metric of storage appears to correlate with Moore’s transistor observation, but drive speeds and seek times have not improved in a similar exponential manner.

This dichotomy may seem a little strange, but I think capacity limitations have been a more significant problem for the industry as a whole than throughput rates, so drive manufacturers have thrown more of their R&D budgets into improving that key characteristic first. The proven, constant increase in storage capacity reflects a focus on meeting user demand for that storage capacity, and if the incremental value of an additional gigabyte of storage decreases, I think we’ll see a similar improvement in throughput rates as manufacturers turn their focus to that other key storage characteristic. Moore’s observation focused on manufacturing with the single goal of more transistors on an integrated circuit, so we can’t really say Moore’s Law “doesn’t apply” to storage since hard drive manufacturers have several key measurements to improve at a given time.

Thanks to the trend Gordon Moore recognized 48 years ago, we were recently able to drop the prices on several of our backup products. EVault Backup is now priced at $1 per GB, down from $2, and Network Backup product is now priced at 50 cents per GB, down from $1, and they are both free for 90 days. If you’re interested in learning more about our data protection and backup options, check out my “What is Data Protection?” blog or leave me your questions in the comments section here.

-Rob

In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn’t have a product line called Backup.

Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.

Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it’s important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.

Data Protection

The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers’ data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products’ goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities – and you’ll be seeing more products and services added soon.

Why do I need data protection? Doesn’t my storage protect my data?

Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.

Planet Alpha’s Data Protection Product Portfolio

Starting on the left side of the graph, you’ll see Network Backup (formerly known as NAS, or Network Attached Storage). Network Backup is purely storage space accessible over the network … we manage the storage hardware for your backups and you can access that space directly, through your own scripts or through third-party self-installed software.

To the right of Network Backup, you’ll see EVault™ Backup (formerly known as DiskSync). EVault™ Backup serves as a traditional backup product with software from a well-known vendor. In addition to the managed storage space provided by our Network Backup solution, the EVault™ software makes scheduling and maintaining regular backups of your data quick and easy.

Our Data Protection Server (formerly known as Dedicated Backup Server) uses R1Soft’s CDPServer software to regularly update and maintain iterative changes of data. Because the Data Protection Server maintains these block-level, up-to-the-minute changes, the software allows you to execute bare metal restores to recover your entire server.

To round out our current data protection product line, we introduced the ability to license and install R1Soft’s CDPServer software on your other servers in the event you don’t need a full dedicated server-worth of space.

Which Delivers the Most Value?

The beauty of this product portfolio is its flexibility to meet your needs, so the answer to the question for you depends on how much data you have to protect and how you want to do that. Network Backup is $1/GB, and EVault™ Backup is a little more expensive at $2/GB, as it includes backup software from EVault. Both these offerings are ideal for customers with less than 300GB of data to protect. Our Data Protection Servers are available in 4 capacities and start at $279 for the 500GB version, and the price per GB can be as low as $0.20/GB.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have some kind of data protection. You might not need the backups all the time, but when you DO, the preparation pays off exponentially.

Limited Time: Backup Bonanza

With the new lineup of Data Protection products, we recently launched a great new promotion to enable all of our customers to try Network Backup and EVault™ Backup FREE for 90 days, and if you’re interested in the Data Protection Servers, you can cut the price significantly by ordering with promo code pa-dbs.

-Rob

Since I shy away from vending machines, trans fats, Las Vegas and scary ingredients, I will stick to my favorite topic: Storage!

It took perhaps a day for our faithful customers to give us clear feedback on our Dedicated Backup Server (DBS) line when it shipped last September, and we listened. They wanted more space, a lower cost per GB and more power. It took us a little more than a day to answer those requests, but we hope our new addition is worth the wait.

We’re proudly announcing the newest addition to the DBS family, affectionately called “The Beast” by those of us who drool over 6 terabytes (TB) of usable and abusable space, dual quad core XEON power, 8GB of RAM and 8 massive TB of monthly bandwidth!

We actually have been building this configuration for a few months on a custom basis, and so it has been heavily tested and approved by our hard-core TB drinkers: They loved it, and you will too!

The regular monthly price is $1,099, and we are going to have a promotion at the launch to make sure these Beasts do not sit around for long. For a limited time, The Beast can be yours for $999/mo … that’s around 16 cents/GB per month, if my math is any good. This is by far the best value in the line, and comes with the same unlimited pool of client licenses, Continuous Data Protection and block level performance as the humble 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB DBS configurations we’ve had available since the product’s launch.

We did hit one problem: the dang things do NOT fit in our vending machines, and the silly machines didn’t accept $100 bills.

Don’t worry, we’ve got a call in to our facilities group.

-Brett