Beyond Backup: How An Integrated Archive Solution
Can Tackle Backup Data Challenges

As organizations manage ever-growing datasets reaching petabyte or exabyte levels, traditional backup methods are increasingly strained to keep up. The sheer scale of these datasets often reveals the limitations of standalone backup systems, which struggle with extended backup windows, performance inefficiencies, and higher storage expenses. Additionally, many backup vendors don’t specialize in tape technology, which often leads to systems delivering only a fraction of their potential performance.

To address these challenges, a new approach is gaining traction: directing backup data to an archiving platform rather than directly to storage. This stacked approach leverages the strengths of both backup and archiving systems, enabling more efficient data management and storage. By integrating backup solutions with advanced archival platforms, organizations can optimize data handling, improve scalability, and reduce costs.

In this article, we explore the evolving landscape of data management, focusing on the benefits of integrating backup and archiving solutions. We will examine how traditional backup systems manage data and the advantages of archiving for long-term data preservation and regulatory compliance. By providing a comprehensive overview of these strategies, we highlight how an integrated solution combining backup and archiving can create a more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective data management solution.

Backup: Ensuring Data Recovery

The primary goal of backup systems is to enable the recovery of primary data at specific points in time. This process involves creating multiple versions of a given data set, which allows for restoration in cases of hardware failure, data corruption, malware attacks, or accidental deletions. Backup data serves as a secondary copy and never replaces primary data.

A significant challenge of backup systems lies in managing extensive metadata. These systems must optimize for fine-grained versioning to achieve point-in-time recovery, allowing the system to revert to its precise state at the time the backup was captured. Unlike systems that prioritize high aggregate throughput or extreme scalability, backup systems focus on space efficiency through compression and deduplication, which eliminates redundant copies in data storage.

Because they don’t prioritize efficient data streaming for the copies, an issue arrives with larger data collections. As the volume of data increases, the time required to complete incremental and full backups—known as the “backup window”—extends, potentially leaving data vulnerable between cycles. Consequently, backups can become less efficient and harder to scale over time.

Archiving: Long-Term Data Preservation

Archiving, in contrast to backup systems, involves relocating valuable primary data from expensive, high-performance storage solutions to more cost-effective, long-term mass storage. This shift not only optimizes storage costs but also ensures that data is preserved for extended periods. Once data is archived, the archival copy becomes the master copy, meaning that the original data on the high-performance storage can be safely deleted. Essentially, while backup involves creating duplicate copies of data for recovery purposes, archiving is about moving data to a different location for long-term storage.

Data archiving is essential for several compelling reasons, the first of which is cost efficiency. Mass storage solutions used for archiving are generally less expensive and more scalable than high-performance storage, making it feasible to store large volumes of data without incurring prohibitive costs. This efficiency is vital for organizations as it allows them to manage storage expenses while still preserving valuable information for the long term. 

Furthermore, by segregating active data from inactive data, archiving improves data management by making it easier to manage and access current operational data. This optimizes space on primary storage systems, improving their performance and extending their lifespan by reducing the load and wear on these systems.

Beyond cost savings, archiving plays a crucial role in regulatory compliance. Many industries are subject to regulations that mandate data preservation for specific periods. Archived data is protected from loss, corruption, or unauthorized access, ensuring compliance and helping organizations avoid fines and legal issues. Furthermore, archived data offers valuable historical insights, enabling trend analysis, informed decision-making, and AI model training.

Beyond its role in regulatory compliance and data analysis, archiving offers significant advantages in terms of data accessibility. Unlike backup systems, which involve a time-consuming restore cycle to recover data, archiving provides a more streamlined approach. Once data is archived, it is stored in a way that allows for faster retrieval and streaming, bypassing the lengthy restore processes associated with backups.

This makes archiving essential for disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Having an archived copy of critical data ensures an organization can quickly restore operations and access essential information after a disaster or system failure. Archiving also contributes to the preservation of knowledge and intellectual property. By addressing these diverse needs, data archiving supports a comprehensive data management strategy, ensuring information remains preserved, accessible, and cost-effectively managed.

Conclusion

As datasets continue to grow exponentially, traditional standalone backup solutions are increasingly insufficient. For these organizations an integrated solution that combines the strengths of both backup software with archival platforms becomes essential. 

In such integrated solutions, backup software channels data to an archival system, which then applies advanced policies to efficiently organize and stream data to mass storage devices. By using the archival platform for advanced data handling, the backup system can scale to much greater capacities without hitting performance bottlenecks.  

Versity champions this integrated approach to data management, offering cutting-edge archiving functionalities that seamlessly integrate with leading backup solutions from partners such as Rubrik, NetBackup, Veeam, and Commvault. For instance, Versity’s ScoutAM integrates with Rubrik’s NAS Cloud Direct to archive petabyte-scale backups at GB/s throughput to cost-efficient media. This integration allows users to benefit from the economic advantages of cloud-scale storage while maintaining a secure, air-gapped on-premises solution.

Versity’s data management platform enhances this integration with advanced data lifecycle management policies that efficiently migrate data to lower-cost, high-capacity storage. By directing backup writes to a Versity mount point, our solution optimizes data storage by strategically sorting it so that smaller files are stored on an object storage system while larger files are archived on tape. This method does not require changes to existing backup workflows, providing faster access to object copies crucial for file retention checks. Additionally, Versity supports both object and tape storage through the same file interface, eliminating the need for special gateways or object protocols to support cloud copies. This optimization of random incoming data streams into efficient streaming data to the archive maximizes storage resource utilization, reduces costs, and ensures long-term data preservation. Importantly, this method does not require any changes to existing backup workflows; it simply works faster and better, delivering significant improvements in data management without disrupting operations. This Versity banking case study is a great example of how this approach delivers tangible benefits in real-world scenarios.

Furthermore, the integration delivers a significant improvement in data restore times. Versity’s solution achieves this by meticulously differentiating between frequently accessed backup index/metadata files and less frequently accessed data sets. This critical distinction empowers the system to prioritize restoring essential index/metadata files, enabling significantly faster retrieval of the underlying data. This translates to minimized downtime and expedited recovery in the event of a disaster.

By combining Versity’s archiving solution with our partner’s backup solutions, we create a streamlined and effective data protection strategy that enhances both efficiency and recovery times. Our unwavering commitment lies in providing innovative solutions that empower organizations to safeguard their critical data while ensuring efficient management. We invite you to explore Versity’s comprehensive data management portfolio and discover how we can tailor a solution to achieve optimal data protection and preservation for your organization.