Enterprises in the digital era are highly dependent on the data center, multi-level backup architecture is the core of business stability. In the face of high downtime costs, ransomware threat, the traditional single-tier backup is no longer applicable, this paper combines the combat dismantling of its design, implementation and problem-solving ideas to help enterprises build data protection system.
Technology continues to iterate, many companies are still dealing with a single point of failure in the data center, the head of the enterprise has built a three-dimensional protection; combined with the combat experience found that business continuity has become the core issue of corporate survival and development from the “icing on the cake”.
Revisiting the Strategic Value of Data Center Backup Architecture
Before designing a multi-tier backup architecture, enterprises should first correct the cognitive bias towards backup and re-understand the strategic value behind it. Backup design that is divorced from business continuity is meaningless. Modern backup architecture has long been not a single technical aspect, but the core strategic layout of enterprise data protection.
Common Misconceptions
From the actual project experience, many enterprises’ understanding of backup still stays at the shallow level of “making a copy of data”, which is far behind the needs of the times. Many enterprises only complete backup by simple file copying, without considering recovery efficiency or business continuity goals.
Such a backup method, in the event of hardware failure, virus attacks, often can not play a practical role, and ultimately let the backup work is reduced to a “formalized operation”, can not provide real protection for enterprise data security.
Three Core Pillars of Effective Backup Architecture
industry consensus is that a set of backup architecture that can be implemented, effective, must address three core issues, these three pillars are interrelated and indispensable, specifically categorized as follows:
- Data integrity: the core is to ensure that under any risk, the core data of the enterprise is not lost, not tampered with, to build a solid foundation for data security.
- Availability: The focus is to ensure that backup resources can be accessed at any time, to avoid meaningless interruption of business due to the unavailability of backup resources.
- Recoverability: The key is that data can be quickly recovered after a failure occurs, minimizing the time of business interruption and reducing the loss caused by the failure.
These three dimensions are the underlying logic of backup architecture design, and all technical choices and tier construction should be centered around these three cores.
Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware attacks continue to escalate, completely exposing the fatal flaws of a single tier of local backups – the local backups that enterprises relied on in the past have been victimized under their targeted attacks.
Many enterprises are facing the risk of high ransom or permanent loss of core data due to the breach of a single backup, and are therefore forced to turn to a multi-tier, three-dimensional backup architecture to build a multi-dimensional data security barrier.
Stereoscopic Data Center Multi-Level Backup Protection System
Based on years of practical experience in disaster recovery planning for large-scale data centers, an effective multi-tier backup architecture requires the construction of a four-tier protection system from the local to the cloud, with each tier playing its own role and cooperating with each other to form a full-scenario coverage from basic failure protection to regional disaster response.
The technology selection and landing method of each layer should be designed in accordance with the business characteristics and risk requirements of the enterprise to ensure that the protection has no dead angle.
Local High Availability Layer
Local High Availability Layer is the foundation of multi-tier backup architecture and the first line of defense against single-point failures, with the core objective of achieving second- or minute-level failover. This layer is mainly realized through RAID, dual-machine hot standby, clustering and other mature technologies, the mainstream practice at this stage is to use distributed storage architecture.
Through multiple copies of data and intelligent scheduling mechanisms, the data is synchronized between local nodes, and even if a single server or storage device fails, it can be quickly switched to ensure that a single point of failure does not affect the normal operation of the business.
Near-end Backup Layer
The near-end backup layer bears the heavy responsibility of responding to the daily risks of the enterprise and realizing rapid recovery. This layer is usually deployed in the same data center or in a neighboring area of the enterprise, and is mainly targeted at common problems such as hardware failures and employee misuse.
As the cost of SSD hardware continues to fall, more and more enterprises are adopting all-flash solutions in this layer. Compared with traditional mechanical storage, all-flash can dramatically shorten the data recovery time from the original hour level to the minute level, which is a perfect match for the enterprise’s daily failure of the rapid recovery needs.
Offsite Disaster Tolerance Layer
The offsite disaster tolerance layer is the key to dealing with extreme risks in a multi-tier architecture. Its core role is to withstand regional disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and fires, and to ensure that business can still be recovered normally in the event of a complete shutdown of the local data center. The design of this tier requires a comprehensive balance of three major factors: distance, network latency, and construction cost.
At present, the industry’s more mature practical solution is to build an off-site disaster recovery center within 300-500 kilometers, which can effectively avoid the synchronous impact of regional disasters, but also maintain relatively low network latency to ensure the efficiency of data synchronization and recovery.
Cloud Backup Layer
Cloud backup layer provides enterprises with a more flexible and economical long-term data preservation solution, and is also an important supplement to multi-tier architecture.
The elastic scalability of cloud storage enables enterprises to flexibly adjust storage resources according to the amount of data, without having to bear the fixed investment of physical storage equipment, and its relatively low cost of use also makes it an ideal choice for cold backup and archiving data.
It should be noted that cloud backup requires higher security and compliance, especially in industries involving sensitive data, such as finance and healthcare, which need to strictly screen cloud service providers and do a good job of data encryption and compliance auditing.
Key Technology Selection and Implementation Points of Multi-Tier Backup Architecture
The landing of multi-tier backup architecture is not a simple superimposition of technologies, but requires a good technical design around the three core aspects of data, network, and management.
The choice of each link has a direct impact on the final effect of the architecture, and only through the integration of the various technical links, in order to make the multi-layered protection system really work.
Data Tiering Strategy
Data tiering strategy is the foundation of the entire multi-tier backup architecture, the core logic is based on the importance of the business and the recovery time requirements, the enterprise data for the refinement of the classification, and then match the corresponding backup strategy and storage media.
The common practice in the industry is to divide the data into three layers: hot data is the real-time data of the core business of the enterprise, using real-time synchronized backup;
warm data is the daily office, non-core business data, using quasi-real-time backup; cold data is archived, historical data, using regular archiving, not only to ensure the rapid recovery of core data, but also to control the overall backup costs.
Backup Network Architecture
Backup network architecture design directly affects backup efficiency and production business stability, and is easy to be ignored; in practice, it is necessary to build a dedicated backup network to avoid backup traffic congestion of the production network and to protect the normal operation of production.
At the same time, we need to do a good job of network multi-path redundancy design, in the event of a network link failure, the backup traffic can be automatically switched to other links to ensure the continuity of the backup business.
Automated Management Platform
In a multi-tier architecture, an automated management platform is the key to improving operation and maintenance efficiency and ensuring stable operation of the architecture. Modern backup systems have long since left the stage of manual operation, and need to have intelligent scheduling, fault self-healing, performance monitoring and other core capabilities.
According to industry statistics, a backup system with a high degree of automation can reduce the proportion of manual intervention by more than 80%, which not only significantly reduces the enterprise’s operation and maintenance labor costs, but more importantly, reduces the risk of misuse brought about by manual operation, and makes the operation of the backup architecture more stable.
Practical Challenges and Solution Ideas of Multi-Level Backup Architecture
Frankly speaking, the construction of multi-tier backup architecture is not smooth sailing, and in the actual project landing, almost all enterprises will encounter all kinds of problems, of which cost, performance, and management are the three most prominent challenges. These problems are not insurmountable, the key is to combine the actual situation of the enterprise, to find a suitable solution to the idea, rather than the pursuit of the “perfect architecture design”.
Cost Control Pressure
A complete multi-tier backup architecture requires a certain amount of capital investment, which is the primary pressure faced by many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Many enterprises are worried about the high investment, directly give up the construction of multi-tier architecture, continue to use the traditional single-tier backup, but buried a greater security risks.
An effective way to solve this problem is to implement it in phases: prioritize the construction of multi-tier protection for the core business and data, and gradually expand to the whole business and data after the budget allows, so as to achieve a balance between protection and cost.
Performance Balancing Difficulties
The essence of backup operation is data reading, transmission and storage, and this process will consume a certain amount of storage and network resources, so how to complete the backup task without affecting the production business is the core difficulty at the technical level.
In the actual project, we use two major techniques to solve the problem: first, differential backup, only backup changes in the data to reduce the amount of transmission; second, intelligent flow limiting, according to the state of production to dynamically adjust the backup bandwidth, divided into peaks and valleys of the speed, to ensure that the two do not interfere with each other.
Rising Management Complexity
Multi-layered backup architecture implies a combination of multiple systems, multiple technologies, and multiple vendors. The more layers of the architecture, the higher the complexity of operation and maintenance management, which puts forward higher requirements for the enterprise’s operation and maintenance team. After many enterprises have built their architectures, the lack of operation and maintenance capability has prevented the architecture from playing its normal role.
The core way to solve the management complexity is standardization and automation:
On the one hand, unify the interfaces and operation and maintenance standards of various systems and technologies, so as to reduce the difficulty of cross-system operation;
On the other hand, further enhance the level of automated management, so that the daily monitoring, scheduling, and troubleshooting can be automatically completed by the system, thus reducing the workload of the operation and maintenance team.
Future Development Trends of Data Center Multi-Level Backup Architecture
Technology drives the backup architecture iteration, and the future multi-level backup architecture will be developed towards intelligent and cloud-based development, with the core shifting from “infrastructure-centered” to “application-centered” to meet the needs of enterprise digital transformation. The core will shift from “infrastructure-centered” to “application-centered” to meet enterprise digital transformation needs.
- AI-driven intelligence: This is the core development trend, AI can enhance the intelligence of the backup system, upgrade the traditional “after-the-fact recovery” to “prevention, optimization, and fast recovery” full-process management, and optimize strategies and predict failures through machine learning. Machine learning optimizes strategies and predicts failures; IDC predicts that about 40% of enterprise backup systems will integrate AI by 2025.
- Cloud-native transformation: Containerization, microservices and other technologies have become popular, and the traditional backup model is no longer applicable. The future backup architecture will deeply integrate cloud-native technologies, realize containers, microservices and fine-tuned backup, and automatically adjust the strategy to fit the enterprise business architecture.
- Backup mode shift: the core from infrastructure-aware to application-aware, the future architecture is centered around application scenarios, with business needs and recovery requirements as the core, so that the backup architecture truly serves the business.
Practical Suggestions for Enterprise Multi-Level Backup Architecture Landing
When planning/upgrading data center backup architecture, although technical and architectural design is important, it is even more critical to do a good job of planning for landing in combination with their own business, budget, and operation and maintenance capabilities; combined with practical experience, the three practical suggestions can help enterprises to avoid detours and promote the landing of the architecture to take effect.
Define RTO and RPO requirements
The core goal of building a multi-tier backup architecture is to ensure business continuity, so before designing the architecture, enterprises should first sort out their business continuity goals and clearly define RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective).
Different business segments correspond to different RTO and RPO requirements:
Core businesses such as financial transactions and e-commerce payments require second- and minute-level recovery; while non-core businesses such as daily office work and data archiving can appropriately relax recovery requirements. RTO and RPO as the core, to start the architecture design, in order to make the architecture more in line with the actual enterprise.
Adopt Open and Standardized Technology Route
When choosing backup technology and equipment, enterprises should try to adopt open and standardized technology route to avoid the technology lock of a single vendor. Many enterprises have chosen a closed vendor technology in the early stages, and later in the architecture upgrade, layer expansion, facing technical compatibility, cost escalation problems.
Open technology routes allow enterprises to flexibly choose different technologies and vendors in subsequent architecture optimization, leaving room for future technology evolution and reducing the cost and difficulty of architecture upgrades.
Emphasis on Personnel Training and Process Building
Even the best technical architecture requires a professional team to operate and manage it, which is also the aspect that enterprises are most likely to neglect.
The operation and maintenance of multi-tier backup architecture requires the team to have the ability of data layering, network design, automation management and other aspects of the enterprise needs to do a good job of professional training of the operation and maintenance team to improve the team’s technical capabilities.
At the same time, it is necessary to establish a perfect operation and maintenance process, clear backup operation, troubleshooting, architecture inspection standards and norms, so that the operation and maintenance work can be followed to ensure that the multi-tier backup architecture can run stably for a long time.
Conclusion
Data center business continuity protection is a complex system engineering, although the multi-tier backup architecture is part of it, it is the most basic core link. Like the significance of insurance for individual families, a perfect multi-level backup system is the guarantee for stable operation of the data center, and also the “last line of defense” for enterprises to resist data risks.
