John Furrier75
Q5: What kind of backup policies exist for recovery? Ie, how long does data stay on your snaps? What kind of SLA exists to restore data from backups?
Chris Dwan
I write SLAs according to impact of the outage, both in terms of number of people and effect on the business.
Chris Dwan
Once we get above a single lab or department, we're talking about operational availability and failover rather than "backup"
Chris Dwan
We've got FDA rules that mandate seven year retention, and some clinical rules that specify "life of the patient." Coupled with exponential data growth, this means that we rarely delete anything. Ever.
Andrew Miller
What's sad is that often there aren't SLA's - just "here's how we've always backed it up b/c can't get clarity/agreement/signoff from the business".
jeff dinisco
in some cases I see SLA's driven from the wrong place, they're based on what the tech in place is capable of, not what the biz actually needs
Stephen Pao
@fdmts - what about the immediate recovery via snapshots or other techniques when data gets accidentally deleted? Do you go back to the 7 year/life of the patient backups or is there something for shorter term?
jeff dinisco
@andriven I see that as often as I see clear SLA's
Andrew Miller
When talk policies to the business, it's often hard if your solution has limitations - i.e. only once per day, restores from tape, etc. You may not even want to start the conversation based on your current solution (sad thoughts I know).
Nick Kirsch
Most common policy I see is: hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots - with daily replication of those snapshots offsite - and a monthly tape backup schedule. User-level restores via snaps, anything else IT-ticket driven.
Chris Dwan
@andriven I sometimes say that we have "good and bad reasons" for retaining data. We retain some data because we signed a contract promising that we would. We retain the rest because we're not sure whether or not we signed such a contract.
Andrew Miller
I do see most customers just doing daily backups b/c it's what they know and what the business is used to. In a perfect world, the focus starts with how often to backup, how long ot keep it, when to archive, when to replicate & match tech to that
Andrew Miller
Retention is often driven by policy around legal holds (if don't have the data can't be asked to get it back). Otherwise it's Operational Recovery focused (i.e. 30-60 days) or regulation (1 year, 7 years).
I am John White
Having a variety of customers we see all kinds of things. Most do daily backups held for 4 weeks, monthly clones held for 12 months, and annual clones held for 3 years. Very few test restores.
Andrew Miller
There's also some interesting blurring here between using snapshots (i.e. non-duplication) and incremental forever+dedup in next gen backup solutions.
Chris Dwan
@nkirsch Agreed. My default is dailies for a week, weeklies for a month, and monthlies until it deforms the storage budget.
jameskobielus
If you never delete anything ever, I'm surprised you have any IT budget left for anything other than backup.
jameskobielus
@andriven In those circumstances, your backup SLAs are effectively whatever your vendor baked into their solution.
Nick Kirsch
@jameskobielus Luckily the cost of the bits continues to decline fast enough.
Andrew Miller
@jameskobielus True...SLA's often are derived from the solution capabilities or limitations for better or worse.
Chris Dwan
@andriven Mutability in the data is an important factor. Most of the bytes in science are immutable ... they're records of what came off the instrument, or derived analysis based on it. In that case, snapshots would be mostly useless.
jameskobielus
@andriven That sounds like the backup policies are retained indefinitely through sheer business inertia, not in alignment with business-continuity imperatives, which may call for backup intervals at odds with existing policies.
Andrew Miller
@jameskobielus Sometimes I hear "business inertia" and think of stories where people use that as a cop-out, other times it's good IT folks that can't get clear direction and just focus on other projects with business impact. :/
Andrew Miller
Chris Dwan Can't believe I didn't talk sooner about mutability/immutability - have been discussing this a lot recently as it relates to ransomware and backups being a line of defense there.
Chris Dwan
@jameskobielus @andriven inertia, or perhaps a de-factor set of priorities from the business. The risks around loss or disclosure of data are very clear. Unless you can make a similarly concise statement around the -benefit- of deletion, the risk wins.
Andrew Miller
People are more motivated by risk than benefit especially with the politics of most organizations.