Tape Strategies for Disaster Recovery

The most basic type of disaster recovery is to copy all of your data to magnetic media and store it in an offsite storage location. In the event of a disaster to the server or the entire building the data will be secure in an offsite location. The data can then be reloaded and business restarted.

The two most important considerations when devising a disaster recovery plan is security and cost. Magnetic tapes are the most common option because they have a large capacity. In addition, they are not-volatile which means they have a very long storage life. However, to get the life you expect out of magnetic tapes they should be stored in a media vault that controls temperature and moisture.

EVault Plan-n-Protect wins Techworld’s Archiving/Backup Product of the Year Award

ContinuVault is the premier provider of EVault in the Pacific Northwest.  Our EVault Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliance won Techworld’s Product of the Year Award for Archiving/Backup!

Techworld, a leading source of IT news, reviews, and how-to’s in the UK, is in its sixth year of celebrating the best products in the IT industry. According to their website, this was a “fiercely contested” competition. Like Manny Pacquiao, EVault Plug-n-Protect was up to the task.

EVault Plug-n-Protect is our all-in-one backup and recovery solution. It includes a full suite of EVault Software, a server head, and storage. Customers have a fast and economical way to get their critical data and systems protected. They get EVault Software – including their choice of EVault Agents and Plug-ins – as well as EVault System Restore, our BMR solution.  They can deploy Plug-n-Protect as a standalone on-premise solution or connect it to our cloud using EVault Offsite Replication Service for Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud (D2D2C) protection.

I haven’t had a chance to speak to any of the judges at Techworld, but it’s likely that they chose EVault Plug-n-Protect because of its value and flexibility.  The price is extremely aggressive when you compare it to similar products on the market; and it’s an even better deal when you compare it to buying the software, hardware, and storage a la carte. But don’t just trust my word. Read what customers, press and analysts are saying about Plug-n-Protect.

12 Best Practices for 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.
2. Breadth of Offering. Choice in product and service offerings meet your business’ needs.
Best Practice: Don’t settle for less than what you need. Vendor offerings vary widely. Some are designed primarily for consumers and others for enterprise data centers. Choose a solution that scales (see scalability below), and offers the features you need to provide the level of service you expect. De-duplication and delta-block technologies will improve performance, reduce your data footprint and save you money. Find out if their de-duplication offering is at the file level or the block level. Make sure the solution can back up servers, PCs, and laptops as well your applications.

7 Ways to Deal with Data Growth from a Cost Standpoint

Susan, an employee of a major insurance company, clicked on her email at work to open a cute home video her friend Debbie sent. That 20mb video file was then stored in her email and, at the end of the day, was diligently backed up by her company’s data storage solution. Just one year later after daily backups of Susan’s email, that one video now takes up 7300 MB of space!

Incredible Data Growth

The incredible growth in the amount of electronic data generated for both business and personal use has resulted in higher costs for data storage and backup. Several factors have lead to these spiraling cost increases, including storage of larger files such as video and audio, multiple backups of the same files, and enforcement of industry compliance regulations. How often is your company backing up duplicate data over the course of a year?
With the exponential increase in the storage of email, video, mp3 files and other large sized files, business storage needs have grown accordingly. In addition to backing up business information, company computers often end up as the de facto backup for personal music, videos and email, resulting in additional backup storage costs for businesses.

What is a Collocation Center?

A collocation center (“colo“) or carrier hotel is a type of data center where multiple customers locate network, server and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Most network access point facilities provide collocation.

Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the benefits of collocating their mission-critical equipment within a data centre. Collocation is becoming popular because of the time and cost savings a company can realize as result of using shared data center infrastructure.  With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, internet, ASP and content providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business.

Additionally, customers reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses. Moreover, by outsourcing network traffic to a collocation service provider with greater bandwidth capacity, web site access speeds should improve considerably.

Major types of collocation customers are:

• Web commerce companies, who use the facilities for a safe environment and cost-effective, redundant connections to the Internet
• Major enterprises, who use the facility for disaster avoidance, off-site data backup and business continuity
• Telecommunication companies, who use the facilities to inter-exchange traffic with other telecommunications companies and access to potential clients
• Credit unions and financial industries as well as other institutions handling sensitive data.
• Increasingly, more and more small business are taking advantage of the benefits of hosting in professional data centers.

How You Benefit

• No Capital Investment – Lease dedicated or virtualized servers with pay-as-you-go software licensing.
• Quality of User Experience – Continū maintains your servers and provides expert technical support, ensuring that you maintain the highest quality user experience.
• Network Availability – Ensure maximum network uptime in our private state-of-the-art data centers.
• Increased Security – Physically and electronically hardened data center facilities.
• Network Flexibility – Gain added flexibility to accommodate new functionality and a growing volume of website visitors or Exchange users.

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Backup & Recovery

In today’s enterprise business environment, data volumes are growing at an explosive rate. As information is the lifeblood of today’s business, its protection is crucial. Continū Vault Platinum enterprise online backup offers the most comprehensive and proven data protection plan designed to meet large-scale business needs.

Continū Vault Enterprise eliminates common problems associated with traditional tape backup methods such as human error and media failure, ensuring that your data is recoverable when you need it. In addition, costs associated with labor, hardware, tape transport, and storage costs are reduced or completely eliminated.

How It Works

Continū Vault Enterprise online backup electronically encrypts and compresses your data, then transfers it to our state-of-the-art data center. After the first full backup, only net new changes are sent, optimizing transfer time, bandwidth, and storage space.