Backup Solutions, Business Continuity, Data Archiving, Data Backup, Data Recovery, Deduplication, Disk Backup, Tape Backup, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
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Ease of Use and Licensing Costs Trump Other Backup Software Features in the Minds of Many SMEs - By Jerome M. Wendt, DCIG (DCIGInc.com) http://revinetix.dciginc.com
Talk all you want about the different features and functions found in backup software. If an IT administrator in a small and midsize enterprise (SME) thinks about backup at all it is in the context of “How easy is it to get it to work?” and “How much does it cost?” However, calculating any backup software’s ease of configuration and price is tricky at best. That’s why backup appliances such as the Revinetix Sentio, that includes all needed backup software features and only charges based upon the amount of capacity purchased, simplifies this buying decision for many SMEs.
The attitude that IT administrators within SMEs exhibit towards backups is simple to understand: they do NOT want to think about it. I recently had a conversation with one such IT administrator who is responsible for four data centers, numerous remote sites, 15 VMware ESX servers, about 200 VMs running Windows, a virtual desktop deployment, his company’s disaster recovery (DR) plan and backup.
So when I asked him questions such as “What his deduplication ratios were?” and “How much backup data he was moving over his WAN on a nightly basis?” he paused and said, “I don’t know and, to a certain degree, I don’t really care. All I know is that using disk as a backup target makes my backups work and I don’t have to think about them anymore plus I now have a handle on my costs.”
He went on to explain that when he selected his solution there were four criteria that it had to satisfy:
1. Make it easy to implement
2. Keep it easy to manage
3. Stop my backup pain
4. Don’t blow my budget
But what was interesting is that when I asked him which one was the single biggest feature that he prioritized above the rest, it was the last one: cost. Yes, he wanted all of the features that everyone reads and hears about - deduplication, disk-based backup, replication, support for multiple operating systems (Linux and Windows) and support for Microsoft applications and features such as Active Directory (AD), Exchange, SQL Server and Windows File Server. But if the backup software’s upfront and ongoing costs were too much, there was no way he could deploy it no matter how much money it saved him.
Further, his situation is representative of the difficulty that most SME IT administrators encounter. They do not have time to learn all of the intricacies associated with managing any one specific technology.
So, trying to arrive at the exact return on investment (ROI) that a specific technology will provide to their business is a bit like trying to read a crystal ball. They often do not have sufficient in-depth information (such as what type or how much data they have, how well their applications are performing, or the success rates of their applications backups) to make an informed decision.
Since they have no way to accurately quantify their current environment, they cannot document what financial benefits a specific new technology will provide to their business. So when they hear that they can achieve a 20:1 deduplication ratio or replicate all of their data offsite, it is interesting but secondary to what they are seeking to accomplish first. Many, if not most, are looking to end their backup pain (which usually entails replacing tape with disk as their primary backup target) and then keeping the upfront and ongoing costs of the solution within budget.
This is where turnkey solutions like Revinetix Sentio come into play. It provides the key technologies that will have the immediate positive impact that SME IT administrators want and which their management will understand. The Revinetix Sentio backup appliance includes:
• Backup software. SMEs often suffer from having a myriad of backup software products as well as applications that go unprotected for a lack of funds. The Revinetix Sentio comes with its own backup software, RevOS, that can be used on as many application servers and desktop clients as the SME may have without incurring additional cost. This allows SMEs to standardize on it and eliminate the licensing costs of other backup software products that they may own.
• Disk-based backup. If there is any one ingredient that has become a key to successfully completing backups and recoveries, it is the use of disk as the primary target for both backup and recovery. Revinetix Sentio natively supports disk with storage capacity on its models ranging from configurations with as little as 500 GB of storage to as high as 70 TBs.
• Microsoft application support. Sentio natively includes backup agents for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server as well as offers AD and Windows file server support.
• Deduplication. Storing data to disk only remains affordable and practical over time if data is deduplicated. The Sentio appliance includes this feature that is critical to disk-based backup.
• Replication. SMEs are tired of DR plans that entail moving tapes in the backseats of their cars. Storing backup data on disk opens the door for them to automatically replicate data offsite. Using Revinetix’ byte-level replication, SMEs can replicate data to another offsite Revinetix appliance or, if they do not have a secondary site, copy data to an external hard drive or even a USB thumb drive.
But what makes the Revinetix solution so valuable is that SMEs get all of these features when they acquire the Sentio appliance. Since Revinetix licenses by capacity and not by the features that are utilized, users are not forced to guess which features they might most benefit from and then pay for them. Instead, Revinetix provides them with all of the features that they need up front and then only charges them based upon the actual amount of capacity that they use, which its deduplication feature helps to minimize.
IT administrators in SMEs are excited as anyone else about the recent enhancements in backup technologies. But, at the end of the day, they do not have time to build a business case for individual technologies as they can only afford to implement the technologies that they can afford, which are easy to implement and manage and solve their immediate backup pain.
This is what the Revinetix Sentio is designed to do. It delivers the simplicity and ease of use that SMEs need in order to solve their immediate backup pain, it keeps backups from again becoming a pain after its deployment and is licensed in such a way that they have access to all of the features that they need without it blowing their budget.
Ease of Use and Licensing Costs Trump Other Backup Software Features in the Minds of Many SMEs - By Jerome M. Wendt, DCIG (DCIGInc.com) http://revinetix.dciginc.com
Popularity: 3% [?]
Data Backup, Data Recovery, Restore
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The title of this entry may seem like a bad thing to hear from a backup company, but it is true. Everyone knows about the importance of backups and backup solutions. Don’t get me wrong, they are important, but they will do you no good if you can’t RESTORE them. It is all about RESTORES! There is a lot of good advice on backup and best practices and so much material that entire books have been written on the subject. My recommendation today is that you take a minute right now and restore something.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Backup Solutions, Data Backup, Tape Backup
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In today’s world, IT managers are being forced to backup more and more business critical data. Often times, using the same outdated equipment. Think about it, if you are still using tape as your backup solution your data has probably doubled if not tripled since the time you initially deployed the solution. In short, you are being forced to backup a whole lot more with what amounts to be a whole lot less.
If you are looking to make a change to your backup solution, where do you start? There is so much noise in the market today around deduplication, cloud archiving, VTL, and much much more. The best way to start is to ask yourself a very basic question:
1. How long can I afford to be without my business critical data?
Now, the answer to this question will vary greatly from business to business. For instance, you may say I have four hours to get my systems back online, you may have 48 hours, or 72 hours, or you might even say, down??? I can’t afford for my systems to be down at all!
If you can answer this question, you can than begin to determine which backup and DR solutions are best for you. By that I mean, if you answer 72 hours than your options are much broader than if you were on the other end of the spectrum and answered, down time, I can’t afford any downtime.
Now, after you have determined how long you can afford for you business critical systems to be down.
2. Ask yourself how much money do we have for the project?
Today more than ever, IT managers are being squeezed and with backup and DR you can really pay as much or as little as you want with the old adage you get what you pay for. So now, you know what you’re down time threshold is, and you know how much money you are working with.
With these two questions answered, you can now start to narrow down which solutions meet your requirements!
Popularity: 17% [?]
Backup Solutions, Business Continuity, Data Backup
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When considering a backup solution, an important area to consider is how often you should perform a backup. There are two approaches to backup frequency. The first is to schedule and manage backup sets, including full and incremental backups. The second approach is continuous backup, sometimes called CDP for continuous data protection. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
The importance of data dictates how often it should be protected. Critical data, defined as essential to the day-to-day activities of your business, should be backed up and archived more frequently than other less important data. With scheduled backups, you determine what data needs to be backed up and how often. The risk in scheduled backups is the duration between backups when data may have changed.
With continuous backup (CDP), every change to data is backed up as it happens. This sounds ideal until you realize that all data is treated equally, requiring larger backup storage capacities. The impact on desktop and server performance, as well as network bandwidth, can be significant. CDP requires more processing power and bandwidth than scheduled backups. CDP is not a good choice for organizations unless they have high bandwidth availability and newer, faster processors in their servers and clients.
Scheduled backup, which can be automated to your requirements and convenience, offers better performance at a lower investment.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Backup Solutions, Disk Backup, Tape Backup
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Academic institutions across North America, including K-12 school districts, colleges and universities, are turning to disk-based backup for data protection solutions to safeguard student records, course materials, electronic mailboxes, web applications, and other school information systems from the possibility of data loss.
Academic environments often have remote campuses, a diverse collection of servers and software applications, limited technical support staff for archiving backup media, and high expectations that student and staff files be recoverable at a moment’s notice. Disk-to-disk-to-disk network backup and recovery technologies meet these challenges head-on and provide an ideal solution for the education market.
A compelling alternative to the cumbersome and unreliable paradigm of tape backup, disk backups provides academic technology administrators with intuitive, high performance and trusted technology. Gone are the days of rotating and re-cataloging tape to find and restore files. Disk based technologies liberate IT staff with ultra-reliable automated disk-back appliances that significantly reduce administrative overhead, software licensing cost, and recovery hassles. Typical setup time is less than one hour and no per-client software license fees are assessed. Traditional tape backup devices can now be replaced with high speed, hot swappable Serial ATA hard disks that can be easily removed and stored off-site for complete disaster recovery measures.
Popularity: 89% [?]
Data Backup, Disk Backup, Tape Backup
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Businesses of every size are experiencing an explosion of data storage needs – due primarily to increased governmental regulation, burgeoning e-mail and collaborative messaging, and the digitization of virtually all business information. Such developments present significant challenges for organizations – particularly the small to medium-sized business (SMB/SME) when it comes to protecting critical data through conventional server backup and recovery solutions.
SMB/SMEs aren’t keeping pace with the accelerating growth of data and the associated need to protect it. They struggle to find a complete data protection solution that is effective, reliable, affordable, and easy to use. Most data backup solutions require the piecemeal process of finding and selecting multiple vendors for the various components needed for data storage, backup, recovery, and archiving. This includes the evaluation of various offerings in servers, disk drives, tape drives, backup software – and then a systems integrator to pull it all together.
In the end, SMB/SMEs too often settle for patchwork solutions which have a high probability of failure due to incompatible components and unreliable technology (tape backup).
Popularity: 96% [?]
Backup Solutions, Data Backup, Deduplication, Disk Backup
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Disk to Disk technology
The backup and disaster recovery industry today is experiencing a renaissance with the advent of Disk to Disk backup technology. The arrival of Disk to Disk based backup technology has enabled a complete rethinking of the backup process and has provided the foundation for new and exciting features to make an administrator’s life much easier.
One bright example of this renaissance is the arrival of Data Deduplication technology. Deduplication is getting a lot of press and attention lately and rightly so as deduplication is one of the biggest industry changing features to date.
Benefits of Data Deduplication
In a nutshell, data deduplication is the process of identifying duplicate copies of data, recording where that data is stored, and finally storing a single copy of that data. This process can result in large space and cost savings for customers.
The typical space savings depends a lot on the data that the data deduplication agent is processing. For example, large encrypted files with little duplicate data will not benefit much from the data deduplication process. However, a team of developers working on the same code, or a team of graphic designers working on the same project generally will have a lot of duplicate data.
A process such as Backup and Archiving which generally has a lot of redundant data (how many copies of Windows or Microsoft Office does your organization have?) can benefit immensely from data deduplication. Some vendors claim up to a factor of 300x for space savings, but a factor of 20x is more realistic.
As mentioned earlier, the data deduplication is a new feature and technology born from the paradigm switch from using tape as a backup medium to using disk as a backup medium. Unlike disk, tape is a sequential or non random-access medium; data can only be read or written in sequence.
This sequential characteristic of tape means that generally, it takes longer to access specific files. Disk to Disk backup enables immediate access to specific files without having to read through the preceding files on the disk. This greatly speeds up the process of both backup and recovery and can save valuable time. It also enables the system to be more efficient, backup the data and move on to the next task.
Client Side Deduplication
In this scenario, the agent residing on the client handles the deduplication process. The client is the ultimate authority of what data resides on it, and what data is changed. Especially for remote offices where network bandwidth is at a premium, being able to deduplicate the data prior to sending it to the backup appliance at the main office saves valuable bandwidth. The down side to this is that the processing of the data consumes client processor time. Depending on the circumstances, the trade off for network bandwidth could be well worth it.
In-Band Deduplication
For appliance based products that use the in-band approach, data is deduped before the data is actually written to the disk. This process has the advantage that the data is only touched once. However, the in-band approach adds increased overhead to the actual backup process, and can slow down the process, which is not ideal.
Out-of-Band Deduplication
For appliance based products that use the out-of-band approach, backup data is first written to disk in-line during the backup process. After the backup is finished, the data is then processed and duplicated data is discarded. Since the data is not processed in-line, there is no overhead penalty during the backup. The trade-off here is that extra storage is necessary while the backup data is being post processed, but there is the assurance that the backup data is captured as quickly as possible.
Best Approach
In our view, the biggest advantage of disk-to-disk technology and data deduplication is being able to combine all three approaches to leverage the strengths of each, while mitigating their weaknesses. For example, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is a Client Side Approach that makes a lot of sense. A CDP based client knows which data has been modified, and can keep track of it on the fly. Newly modified data is rarely a duplicate and can be confidently sent to the backup server appliance. When the back end server is coordinated with smart clients, duplicated data can be identified on the fly; greatly reducing overall network congestion while minimizing client side processing.
Data deduplication is big win in any backup environment; as is replacing tape with disks as an archival medium. We recommend you consider incorporating Disk to Disk and Data Deduplication technologies into your Backup processes.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Tape Backup
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Tape backup systems surfaced as popular options for personal computer and business use in the mid 1970s. The technology, innovative at the time, used magnetic tape reels to backup important information contained within a home or business computer for restoration needs in the event of a computer failure. Recording methods for tape backup systems may be linear or scanning. Linear recording stores information copied in parallel tracks. Many cassettes may record simultaneously using this simple form of recording, yet the amount of data allowed to be recorded is limited with this method. Linear serpentine recording allows for much higher data amounts than traditional linear methods. Scanning technology allows for data to be recorded across the width of the tape versus the length. Specific types of scanning include transverse scans, arcuate scans, and helical scans. Although still in use, modern backup systems typically use a disk solution versus the older tape recording methods.
Popularity: 54% [?]
Disk Backup
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The uncertainty of today’s technology requires a disk backup solution that can best serve your business in efficiency and convenience. Managing your solution requires understanding of your recovery point objective, recovery time objective, and data security. Recovery point objective is essentially the recorded data restore point that your system will be reverted to in the event of a loss. This recovery point needs to be constantly updated in order to store your most recent file changes. The recovery time objective is the amount of time between the loss and recovery of data. A longer recovery time objective means you won’t have access to these files for that amount of time. Most important in your disk backup solution is your data security. Backing up your files is not advantageous if it exposes them to unauthorized access. Data encryption and other security features should be implemented to protect your information with each backup performed.
Popularity: 65% [?]
Business Continuity
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According to industry experts, most small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) operate with woefully inadequate data storage protection solutions to guard against disaster. Data backup Research conducted by the U.S. Small Business Administration confirms that 93% of companies that lose their critical data go out of business within 2 years.
SMB/SMEs continually put themselves at great risk – largely because most data protection solutions are designed for the enterprise organization, and enterprise solutions are cost-prohibitive and therefore out of reach for the SMB/SME.
Popularity: 65% [?]
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