backup and recovery_redesign

BACKUP AND RECOVERY REDESIGN.

DO MORE WITH LESS… REALLY!

Table of Contents

Backup and Recovery Redesign

Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art

A Better Way

Give It a Test

Resources from AppAssure

What AppAssure Customers Say


Do more with less… really! Any company that relies on data intensive

applications like e-mail, financial, human

re-source, customer management, and

product development systems – and

that’s every company – is experiencing

data explosion.

Mandated by legal compliance and

required by management best practices,

data protection measures including

backup, storage, and re-trieval, are more

mission-critical than ever.

On top of that, demands for high availability and fast disaster

recovery are increasing.


Do more with less… really!

Unfortunately, enterprise‐wide solutions that rely on tape backup are

less efficient and more costly than ever.

New disk‐based backup solutions that focus on application – not just

data – protection are redefining the state-of-the-art by realizing

significant time and money savings through:

data expansion moderation

fast backup

easy data retrieval

high availability assurance

and reliable disaster recovery


Enterprise-wide tape backup

Not so long ago, but in the last century, companies rapidly increased their reli-

ance on electronic data. E-mail and other corporate systems (financial, human

resources, product development, etc.) systems added great efficiencies. We

can’t imagine a corporation without them. They also required new diligence for

data protection; backup, storage, and retrieval systems became mission-critical.

It is still typical for an organization to rely

on an enterprise-wide tape backup

system to protect their data. Those

enterprise-wide systems were adopted with

the expectation of gaining cost-efficiencies

including greater leverage with hardware

and software vendors and IT staff ability to

build expertise with one feature set.


Enterprise-wide tape backup

In reality, traditional tape backups are time and money resource drains.

They don’t efficiently address disaster recovery and they actually

complicate everyday demands for system availability and mailbox or

message retrieval.

The scale has tipped and tape backup

costs have far outweighed benefits.

tape

backup

costs

tape

backup

benefits


“Backup administration is the largest consumer of storage staffing

resources, as organizations in the Fortune 1000 indicate on average,

20% of their resources are allocated to backup and recovery tasks.”

theinfopro.com

As data protection costs have exploded along with data growth, they’ve

caught the attention of budget‐cutting CIOs.

Why do so many

backup administration

systems

consume so much of the

budget devoted to data

protection?


1. Backup systems are slow and inefficient.

It’s typical for a tape-base system to require hours for a full data store

or data-base backup. System overhead often requires administrators to

wait until applications are not in use before running a backup. Of course,

applications like e-mail are almost constantly in use; asking users to log

off and wait – especially for hours at a time – is a productivity killer.

That means that full‐backups are often

run at night or on weekends.

Administrators either tend to the

process or leave the office with fingers

crossed that everything works.


1. Backup systems are slow and inefficient.

Retrieving data is also a time-

consuming process. Administrators

mount tapes and search through

archives to find missing messages or

lost entries and then go through a

variety of processes to restore the

data for the end-user.


2. Storage is expensive.

It’s Tape is cheap unless you’re

constantly buying it.

As data stores continue to grow, buying

more and more tape drives and tape

becomes… less… and… less… cost

effective.


3. Traditional systems are hard to manage.

Enterprise-wide tape backup effectively increases your staff, media,

and hardware budgets. That’s ironic since they were adopted to curb

those costs.

Again, the continual doubling of data

stores has imposed processing

overhead that takes staff time, sucks

up storage, and requires greater

and greater processing power.

A Better Way "Backup has emerged as the leading area of focused improvement for Fortune

1000 storage organizations in 2007. Front end storage growth, regulatory

compliance and increasing data retention times have created a need for backup

innovation to maintain the highest levels of data protection."

Robert Stevenson, Managing Director for Storage, theinfopro.com

A Better Way The call to protect corporate data in less time and for less money has

inspired a whole new way of thinking about backup – a complete backup

redesign. Rather than relying on tape and focusing on data, new

technology utilizes disk space and focuses on applications. Think about

it, if a server crashes or a server room floods, end-users need fast

access to restored applications, application states, and application data.

A Better Way Those capabilities alone outpace traditional tape backup but the time and

cost savings realized through disk-based application protection is equally

compelling. Bare metal restore and single message retrieval processes take

minutes rather than days or hours leading to huge downtime savings.

Gartner estimates that system downtime costs are calculated at

$25/user/hour of downtime.

And companies are experiencing backup

data reductions as high as 60% which

significantly reduces the budget for

tapes and their storage.

A Better Way Goodbye tape, hello disk

Rather than backing up once a

day or once a week and storing

data on tape, disk-based

application protection programs

run continuously, taking snapshots

and copying only changed blocks

to a server.

Compressed and deduplicated data

is stored as a point-in-time image

that includes the operating system

and system state along with

application data.

A Better Way That makes it much easier to retrieve and restore lost data whether a

single e-mail message or entire database. Rather than mounting and

searching through backup tapes to locate needed data and then restoring

that data to an application – a process which takes at least hours –

administrators using disk-based application protection conduct

restores in minutes.

For a complete server restore, the

admin can rewind to the last “good”

point-in-time image. End‐users pick

up where they left off just minutes

before.

A Better Way

Some disk-based application protection solutions also include the

ability to mirror a protected server on a virtual server – maybe one in

another location. These “standby” servers are ready to go at a

moment’s notice which is perfect for fast disaster recovery.

As obvious as it is, it bears pointing out

that ad-ministrators no longer have to

budget for tape and tape drives. While

“storage is cheap”, tape has to be

bought, stored, retrieved, and

maintained.

None of that overhead is required

by disk-based protection.

A Better Way

Combining Backup, Recovery, High Availability, and

Retention With all the overhead imposed by tape backup, it only delivers one benefit – data

protection. But disasters require full-application restores as do some more

mundane system failures – a server crash for instance.

Disk-based application protection delivers backup, recovery, high availability,

and retention capabilities in one solution. The “one solution” approach brings

the same efficiencies that a single,

enterprise-wide tape backup approach

sought to afford:

one application to learn and

maintain, fewer hardware and

software vendors in the mix.

Give It a Test

Combining Backup, Recovery, High Availability, and

Retention

Companies attempting to save time &

money on backup, restore, disaster

recovery, and high availability should

make sure evaluated technologies can

answer “yes” to these questions:

1. Does the product take advantage of application‐specific innovations?

2. Is it possible to conduct a live recovery of all or a portion of the application

quickly and easily?

3. Will you be able to rollback from bare metal to and from any environment

(P2V, P2P, V2P, V2V) to meet disaster recovery requirements?

4. Does the product monitor the health of backups?

Give It a Test

5. Will the product significantly shorten your backup window today and

into the future through an efficient volume‐based approach?

6. Is data expansion moderated with deduplication and compression?

7. Will the technology handle the range of recovery situations – single

e‐mail messages to full‐blown disasters – with reliability, ease and

speed?

8. Does the product support continuous

export of images to standby or virtual

machines?

9. Is the restore process flexible with

images transportable to USB, NAS,

DAS, and DAN?


AppAssure Software is a provider of innovative backup and disaster

recovery software that has been purpose‐built for Windows applications.

Designed to protect the applications, not just the data, AppAssure solutions

deliver high-value features for reliable data protection that is corruption-free.

Using a centralized server architecture, AppAssure

solutions feature off-host processing that will eliminate

backup windows and enable a live restore for a down

application.

As a result, IT administrators can have

the confidence that their Windows

applications are completely protected

and easily recoverable in the event of

data loss or disaster.


AppAssure is a member of VMware Technology Alliance

program, a Microsoft Partner, as well as the member of

other technology partnerships with leaders in the industry.

Resources from AppAssure AppAssure is the world’s fastest and

easiest backup and disaster recovery

software for Windows application servers

and desktops.

The only complete “all-in-one” backup and

disaster recovery software solution,

AppAssure enables local recoveries from

any type of failure in just minutes, with the

added assurance of offsite application and

data backup and recovery from a total

site disaster.

What AppAssure Customers Say Brendan Hourihan – Technology Services Network Engineer, Flagler College:

“With AppAssure, I thought I entered into a dreamland! Finally I’m

talking with somebody who has a philosophy about backups that

makes sense – a more logical approach to how data is backed up

AND what you can do with the backed-up data: you can replicate it,

synchronize it, and more!”

Peter Hammerl – IT Administrator, Hamilton Port Authority:

AppAssure is working great. I’ve tested restoring files and databases,

and everything has gone smoothly. The application is pretty granular

so we can choose what to backup, at what time intervals, etc. We

can get exactly what we want when we want it.”

Eric Sagerdahl – IT Analyst, Walden House:

“We’ve always been happy with the support … if you really need to

talk to somebody right away, there’s always someone right there for

you... I honestly don’t know how we would have recovered all the

data before AppAssure.”

Questions

If you have questions about AppAssure Backup & Replication software,

please select an option below to contact us:

Sales: [email protected]

Support: [email protected]

Phone: +1 (703) 547-8686

Web: www.appassure.com

Download a FREE trial of AppAssure Backup & Replication at

www.appassure.com

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