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Data protection: back to basics

As more and more data is passed across networks, companies are recognising the importance and value of the data on their servers and PCs and the significance of protecting this data as well as the hardware it resides on.

"As the value of data has grown exponentially, the importance of protecting the availability of the network has become critical," says Carl Kleynhans, country general manager, Africa at American Power Conversion (APC). "Increasing numbers of businesses have realised that they cannot tolerate any downtime in their networks, particularly with customer satisfaction and revenue streams being so closely tied to equipment availability."

According to Kleynhans, the last few years has seen the value of data being created, transferred and stored continue to multiply. "Not only is the quantity of data increasing, but e-commerce applications are literally transferring, processing and storing money on their servers."

With system downtime so costly, companies must plan effective strategies for improved availability. "Achieving 99,999% availability, translating to a mere five minutes of downtime per year, is very difficult to achieve due to the downtime ripple effect," says Kleynhans.

"The ripple effect means that a one-minute power failure translates to between 10 and 20 times longer in terms of unavailability. The reason for this is that a one-minute power outage may cause a hard drive to crash on an unprotected system or may involve rebooting the servers, remounting the volume and reconnecting workstations. If power is lost, even momentarily, the entire operating system may have to be re-installed, together with application software."

In addition, should the power outage corrupt the database, it will be an even more lengthy process to restore the previous back-up, and this is not considering the impact of lost data that has not yet been backed up.

"It stands to reason then that one of the most critical investments to be made by a network manager is in a power protection solution. Without an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to protect sensitive electronic devices from the frequent power events experienced in South Africa, damaged equipment or lost data is always an imminent danger."

Kleynhans maintains that to ensure continuous operation through any power problem, the entire data path must be safeguarded, including hubs, routers, gateways, LAN switches and bridges. "Power continuity is crucial to the operation of these often isolated pieces of the network. The fact that each piece of technology depends on the next makes these systems even more likely to experience downtime, further adding to the high-availability appeal.

"A UPS can help improve network throughput and eliminate excess traffic caused by lost messages. It achieves this by protecting equipment from the momentary power problems that result in downtime.

"More and more UPS devices, just as the information technology they protect, are being designed for greater power availability," he concludes.

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