Compuquip

Edition 11 | December 2011

Welcome to the 11th edition of Quip Notes, the newsletter presented to you by Compuquip!

To download a printable version of the newsletter, click Quip Notes December 2011

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Bill, the IT Director at a law firm, received the emergency call at 6am. A pipe had ruptured in the firm’s building and the server room was flooded. Bill knew it was going to be a long few days. First he’d have to repair or probably replace the hardware, spend hours rebuilding the system software, retrieve the right tapes from an offsite storage facility and then restore the data. Theoretically, it would take several long days of effort but should all work just fine. Unfortunately for Bill, reality set in. After replacing the hardware and installing the system software, many of the firm’s data tapes were unreadable and they lost 50% of their data. Read more »

The case for disk backup versus tape backup is clear. Tape-based backup systems, are built on decades old technology and can’t compete with modern disk-based backup systems. Disk-based backup systems offer superior performance in terms of: Read more »

The best data protection systems incorporate the ability to restore your most critical data first, then use a tiered approach to recovering less critical information. If you lose data or even an entire system, your solution should let you create strategies for recovering it in this manner, based on its business impact.

Today there are a variety of data protection options that help you recover quickly and potentially save you significant expense when restoring your business operations. Here are twelve best practices for managing your data backup and recovery.

1. Reliability. Up to 71% of restores from tape contain failures
Best Practice: Use disk-to-disk technology for backups

With disk-to-disk technology, your backup data resides on disk drives, proven to be far more reliable than tapes. When your backup completes, you know the data is secure and accessible on the disk drive. With tapes you never really know if your data is usable until you try to restore it, at which point it’s too late. Read more »

What’s more, they’ll have “one throat to choke” – a single point of contact for all their support needs. This trend is supported by a recent survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategies Group (ESG). In that survey, more than half of the respondents – both small and mid-size businesses – indicated that they “would prefer to rely on a single vendor for their data protection solutions whenever possible.”1

All-in-one DP solutions include all of the hardware and software necessary to get up and running quickly:

• Hardware: The hardware configuration can vary depending on the type of target customer. Solutions for SMBs are often a network attached storage (NAS) server with two or three terabytes of internal storage. Solutions for mid-size companies are typically server node(s) with SATA or Fibre Channel storage.
• Software: All-in-one DP solutions usually come with backup and recovery software. The software may include agents to protect each client, plug-ins for granular protection of applications, management and reporting tools, and a server component that handles the backend processing. Some solutions also include data duplication, compression, encryption, bare-metal recovery, and continuous data protection (CDP) functionality. Depending on the particular solution and vendor, these may cost extra.
• Support & Warranty: All-in-one DP solutions will typically include support for the backup application and warranty coverage for the hardware. Additional service offerings are almost always available. These can include 4-hour onsite response for hardware repair, training and certification programs, disaster recovery planning and testing, and software implementation. Read more »