Outsourcing involves the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of an entire business function to an external service provider, which may belong to another country. The client organization and the supplier enter into a contract which defines the transferred services. Under the agreement, the supplier acquires people, assets and other resources from the client. The client agrees to procure the services from the supplier for the term of the contract. Business segments typically outsourced include information technology, human resources, facilities, real estate management, and accounting. Many companies also outsource customer support and call center functions like telemarketing, customer service, market research, manufacturing, designing, web development, content writing, ghostwriting and engineering.

‘Outsourcing’ became a popular political issue in the United States during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Criticism of outsourcing, from the U.S. citizens, mainly reflects the concern that outsourcing jobs overseas hurt the economy and that the U.S. government should impose some legislative action against companies that outsource.

IT services is one business segment that takes a majority of the outsourced jobs in foreign countries. One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing IT services is the lower personnel costs. Full-time employees that perform these services within a company usually require standard pay raises, retirement plans, medical benefits and other benefits that a permanent employee enjoys. Outsourcing these services also allows the company to free up space in the building and office area, with employees, computer systems and other equipment. This freeing up of space also allows the company to put it to other important uses, thus increasing company efficiency. Many large IT companies transferred their customer care and other service programs overseas to countries such as Asia, Mexico and India because of cheaper labor standards. Although the labor to pay these workers is much cheaper, the quality of service remains the same and it allows the company to focus on strengthening and building their company. A problem of outsourcing IT services is that the company loses direct control over the managements of the service team and may have to provide some sort of training to transfer this idea to another set of workers in a different region of the world. A slow response time is another disadvantage to consider when outsourcing these IT services. Because these service people are working in another time zone, there may be delays in the time it takes to complete tasks, thus affecting both the employees and the customers. Foreign workers, while fluent in the English language, may have strong accents that may affect a helpdesk service.

Your data center’s backup needs might be able to be met by an open-source backup software package, possibly saving you quite a bit of money and giving you greater control over its functionality. One of the biggest reasons that some are interested in open-source backup software is that they have access to the code. This allows them to bend the product in ways they could not do with a commercial package. Let us have a look at a few open-source backup software packages. All of these provide support for Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, although to varying degrees.

Amanda is the oldest of the open-source backup software packages. Amanda stands for the Advanced Maryland Disk Archiver. On one level, Amanda is a scheduling, automation, and tracking program. The database that tracks all backups allows you to restore any file from any previous version of that file that was backed up by Amanda. On another level, Amanda is a sophisticated program that has a number of enterprise-level features, like how it automatically determines when to run your full backups, instead of having you schedule them. It’s also the only open-source package to have database agents for SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle, and the only backup package to have an agent for MySQL and Ingress.

Amanda is now backed by Zmanda, which has addressed major limitations in the product.

Bacula was originally written by Kern Sibbald. Bacula also has scheduling, automation and tracking of all backups performed by the product, allowing you to easily restore any file (or files) from any previous version. Like Amanda, it also has media management features that allow you to use automated tape libraries and perform disk-to-disk backups.

Both Amanda and Bacula have support for both disk and tape, scheduled full and incremental backups.

BackupPC is a disk-only backup tool that performs incremental backups, and stores those backups in their native format in a snapshot-like tree structure available via a GUI. Like Bacula, it is a file-only backup tool. It’s single most impressive feature is that it does file-level deduplication.

If you want the least proprietary backup format, you should choose BackupPC. If database agents are required, you’d choose Amanda. If you want the product most designed like a commercial backup application, you should choose Bacula. Amanda and BackupPC require a Linux server to control your backups, where Bacula does have a Windows version of their server. All three products are very popular. You can download a free version and try any of them before deciding to buy commercial support.

Apart from the obvious need of storing data, an enterprise data storage solution has to meet many other requirements. These include protection against network security threats, backup plans, disaster recovery setup, and also compliance with legislations on the process of storing, managing, and archiving data. Data integrity and privacy are of special importance to the large organizations. When selecting an enterprise storage solution, factors to be considered are, the amount and type of data as measured by I/O and throughput requirements, availability of reliable data for mission-critical applications, scalability, budget, backup and recovery.

Providers of such services frequently target specific market segments. High-end LAN-based backup systems may offer services such as near-real-time transaction-level replication or open file backups. For a comprehensive analysis of enterprise online backup solution providers, they can be categorized intomust have and highly preferred.

Must haves

Username/password based authentication

High encryption for all data being transmitted to the data center of the online backup provider

Support for fast backups after the initial backup using advanced incremental backup technologies.

Compressed backups to help conserve end user’s bandwidth.

Automated backup that does not involve user intervention to initiate daily backups.

Open file backups.

Ability to retrieve Data versioning to help users retrieve their files as of different backups

backed up data in one piece.

Backup versioning where at least 10 to 30 copies of user data is maintained.

24 X 7 access to technical/customer support

Highly preferred

Encryption of data: Customers prefer their data to be encrypted.

Support for different operating systems: Support for Windows, Linux, Mac OS based systems.

Web-based central management console: Most service providers provide this to manage their backup job status, view detailed logs of backup/retrieval activity among other reporting features.

Data center requirements: Most customers prefer basic norms such as earthquake protection, fire protection etc. from the data centers at which online backup companies host their data.

Support for MS SQL/Oracle/Exchange server backup: This is an enterprise class requirement where customers are looking for a cost-effective online backup solution that can take over the online backup of their databases without bringing the databases down during the process.

Vendors either charge per GB of data backed up by the customer or per GB of storage made to their vault. An alternate pricing strategy is to charge per device of storage. Usually, they do not charge for the online backup software (which comes free and forms the essence of the SaaS model) but on basis of the monthly/annual subscription cost of using the service.

Performing data backup and recovery in a Linux environment poses some unique challenges. Some of the biggest hurdles people run into with Linux backup have to do with compatibility. For example, people buy an elaborate tape library, and there are no Linux drivers available to go with it. Also when someone chooses an agent-based backup software product, and they are backing up a heterogeneous environment, no such agents are available for the operating systems they are trying to back up. Are there specific tools available for Linux backup? Do the major data backup software vendors offer Linux compatible products? Most data backup software vendor supports Linux to at least some degree. What about data deduplication? Are there products available that perform deduplication in a Linux environment? There are, but data deduplication is performed by most vendors as byte-level backups. But in the Linux environment, is data deduplication at the file-level. The following is a selection of Linux backup solutions:

AMANDA (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) is a free backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. Platform: Linux / Unix.

Bacula is a set of free computer programs that manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. Platform: Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS/Solaris, Windows.

Mondorescue is one of those tools for disaster recovery because it can back up an entire installation. Another strength of Mondorescue is that it can back up to nearly any medium: CD, DVD, tape, NFS, hard disk, etc. And Mondo supports LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, and VFAT. If your file system isn’t listed, there is a link on the Mondo Web site to email the developers for a file system request.

Arkeia is an enterprise-level backup-restore solutions including replication server solutions. As the price is quite high ($ 1,300.00 USD), it is best suited for large business to enterprise-level needs.

Backup Express is an enterprise-wide backup and restore solution for heterogeneous network environments. Its unique distributed architecture provides centralized control for all backup and restore functions with a single catalog. Platform: Linux / Unix, Windows.

Time Navigator for Linux is a complete professional backup solution, with the possibility to protect heterogeneous networks including Windows, Unix, NetWare or VMS machines. Platform: Linux.

Among the enterprise-level vendors Symantec Corp. Veritas and CommVault both offer Linux solutions.

Until now, the full recovery of a server after a catastrophic failure could take several hours. Bare Metal Recovery technology is able to quickly recover an unusable system. It can restore both system and data in a single pass, eliminating the need for multiple backups and significantly reducing downtimes.

Bare-metal restore is a technique where the backed up data is available in a form which allows one to restore a computer system from “bare metal”, i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system. Typically, the backed up data include the necessary operating system, applications and data components to rebuild or restore the backed up system to an entirely separate piece of hardware. Bare-metal restore differs from simple data backups where application data, but neither the applications nor the operating system are backed up or restored as a unit.

An organization that places importance on its computer data must adopt an offsite backup system. By opting for offsite backup, one is guaranteed to be able to carry on with one’s activities following a computer crash. Offsite data backup offers many features, some of which are:

Encryption: Before data is transmitted, it is encrypted according to Advanced Encryption Standards (AES). AES provides maximum security and helps avoid unintentional access, deletion, and file corruption. The only way to decrypt the data is with a password or encryption key that the software creates before transmission.

Full reporting: With every offsite data backup, the client gets a report that details what was copied, when it was transferred, and whether or not the transfer was successful.

Permission setting: This option allows the client to select which computers get backed up and which employees have access to view or restore files.

Version control: With version control, the client can select a specific version of a file that needs to be restored.

Local data store: This allows additional copies of the data to be stored on a local device as a secondary backup.

Bare metal restore: Vendors offer an optional “bare metal” restoration for rebuilding a computer or server from scratch. Using a separate storage device, the vendor creates a mirror image of the client’s complete system. The device is then shipped to the data center and stored. In case of a system crash, the system can be restored to its original configuration.

In addition to these features, vendors may offer remote access to client’s files and comprehensive training.

Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time. CDP is a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. Continuous data protection is different from traditional backup in that traditional backups can only restore data to the point at which the backup was taken. With continuous data protection, there are no backup schedules. When data is written to disk, it is also asynchronously written to a second location, usually another computer over the network. This eliminates the need for scheduled backups.

CDP products are available in two forms: near-CDP and real-CDP. Near-CDP products take advantage of application, file system or volume-level snapshot features that are available with some applications and server operating and storage systems. Near-CDP products take frequent, periodic (typically about every 15 minutes) snapshots of application data using these available application or system snapshot features. Most near-CDP products are limited to a maximum number of snapshots that the application, operating system or storage system can create. Real-CDP products continuously capture or track data modifications and store changes independent of the primary data. These products may be block-, file- or application-based and provide finer levels of control in restoring data by providing an almost infinite number of recovery points.

Continuous data protection will protect against some effects of data corruption by allowing to restore a previous, uncorrupted version of the data. Transactions that took place between the corrupting event and the restoration will be lost, however. They could be recovered through other means, such as journaling. Most continuous data protection solutions save byte or block-level differences rather than file-level differences. This means that if you change one byte of a 100 GB file, only the changed byte or block is backed up. Traditional incremental and differential backups make copies of entire files.

The market for CDP products is expected to grow as businesses discover the advantages of maintaining a continuous journal of backups or archives. The best way for businesses to plan recovery requirements for the majority of their applications is to make continuous data protection (CDP) a part of their data protection. This is especially true for enterprises in which, data changes often and the amount of stored data is large.

Taking backups is an important way of safeguarding data. A full backup backs up all the files in a partition or on a disk. This is the simplest form of backup, but it is also the most time-consuming, space-intensive and the least flexible. Typically full backups are only done once a week or a month or after an operating system upgrade or software install.

Most of the information on a computer changes very slowly or not at all. This includes the applications, the operating system and even most of the user data. Typically, only a small percentage of the information in a partition or disk changes on a daily, or even a weekly, basis. So, it makes sense only to back up the data that has changed on a daily basis. This is the basis of sophisticated backup strategies.

Differential backups were the next step in the evolution of backup strategies. A differential backup backs up only the files that changed since the last full backup. Differential backups are quicker than full backups because so much less data is being backed up. But the amount of data being backed up grows with each differential backup.

Incremental backups also back up only the changed data, but they only back up the data that has changed since the last backup.

Differential and incremental backups are easy ways to reduce the time and space requirements of backups. This benefit increases when you want to keep multiple backups of the same data.

One drawback of the incremental backup comes if you need to do a full restore. Suppose you’re following the full backup on every 1^st day of the month, incremental daily backup scheme. Now suppose your hard drive fails on 30^th. Having to restore from 29 different incremental backups can be pretty time-consuming. Now consider the same backup scheme with a differential backup instead of an incremental backup on the 7th, 14th, 21^st and 28^th of the month. What happens if you have to do a full restore on the 30th of the month with this revised scheme? First, you restore from the initial, full backup from the 1st of the month. Next, you restore from the differential backup you made on the 28th of the month. Finally, restore from the incremental backup made on the 29th of the month. That’s just restoring from 3 discs instead of from 29, a vast improvement. So a properly thought-out backup scheme is necessary for quick and error-free restore of backed-up data.