Redstor - Backup, Recovery & Archive

Backup, Recovery and Archive

Over recent years, IT departments have become overburdened by the need to protect ever increasing data quantities, in continually decreasing windows and against more demanding service level agreements (SLAs). The dependence on full time availability of data calls for reliable backups to ensure protection of mission critical data. Equally important with backing up data is the ability to recover data and to recover it in a timely fashion to keep a business ‘up and running’.

Further to this, data retention, archiving and off-site storage requirements introduce new challenges, challenges that often exceed the capabilities of traditional backup and recovery technologies. These backup, recovery and archiving challenges are further compounded by the move toward remote and disparate sites, often connected over slow or unreliable network links.

There are many questions to be answered in backup and recovery:

What is considered best practice?
What backup media should be used?
Should tape or disk, or both, be used as a backup target?
What about virtual tape?
What is data deduplication?
Does deduplication have a place in the environment?
Should data be encrypted?
Should data be archived?
How can performance be improved.

The design of a good backup and recovery solution needs to take into account the business requirements, as well as the operational environment. A recent approach treats backup/recovery and archiving as two interrelated processes that can complement each other and improve business operations. Archiving has traditionally been used for compliance and for long term data retention, audit and analysis. More recently it is has been used to assist in backup and recovery. This approach starts by asking one simple question, “How often has the same file or data been backed up, even though the content has not changed?” When data in the production environment is not changing or being frequently accessed, it could be moved into an online archive that is accessible to the applications and users. This ‘frees up space’, which can improve performance, reduce storage costs and accelerate the backup and recovery process.

Redstor has answers to the many questions and helps companies find ways to protect and archive data in the most effective manner without impacting the services provided by the data centre.