Storage Backup - Archive Solutions

Choosing a Storage Backup - Archive technology is definitely not an easy task. With the multitude of storage backup solutions out there, careful planning is needed in order to choose the solution which best suits your particular requirements.

A Storage Backup - Archive solution must be efficient. This translates in:

  • - Use of a Tiered Storage architecture. Designed according to your data structure, the tiered storage approach is reducing costs, while meeting the Service Level Agreement requirements.
  • - Fast e-discovery of data as required by Compliance regulations.

Types of Storage Backup

Yes, tape backup is still here. Despite many claiming the tape backup is dead, a smaller organization can actually still do its backups directly to tape, and still meeting the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). With the LTO 4 and now, the new LTO 5 technologies, the restores can be pretty fast, and tape backup is a cost-effective solution.

This stands when thinking that the data size grows now at unprecedented rates. The disk to disk backups on conventional disks can require a high number of RAID arrays, thus increasing the cost of disk storage. 

The so called "short-term" storage has the role to keep backups readily available, and might not be quite "short-term" after all. The backups must be kept for one month at a minimum, or two months, or even six months. With conventional disks, this is going to take lots of disk space, up to the point when adding disks might not be an option anymore. More than that, one day you might decide to replicate your disk based backups to a recently acquired remote location. This is going to use lots of bandwidth. What is needed is to actually use disk to disk backup combined with Data Deduplication.

If you are a tape backup fan, the good news is that the tape backup unit functionality is emulated by disk based devices such as a Virtual Tape Library, which is also performing data deduplication..

Back to data archiving, you need to archive the data files (file system archiving), and the email. With email storage growing so fast, and with more than 50% of company's intellectual property stored in user's mailboxes, data archiving is a must. The importance of Email archiving is two fold: you must archive that data for compliance reasons, and, on the other hand, by creating the email archive, you can manage the data storage more efficiently.