A backup appliance is an important asset in an organization and choosing the right one is crucial to the success of the business. While costs need to be kept at bay, there are certain factors of backup and recovery that can’t be compromised either.
Once you decide on certain components such as backup storage space, type of storage solution and the number of sites to back up, choosing the right backup location will be your next big consideration.
Choosing a Backup Location: disk, tape or cloud
The backup location is an important factor in the data backup and the disaster recovery system as it determines the speed with which your data will be restored in the event of a disaster. Here are a couple of different options:
Disk
If your business is heavily dependent on data and if your financial losses are estimated to be quite high if you lose your data for even a couple of minutes, then an online disk copy is a good option for you. An online disk copy helps you restore the lost data immediately, thus saving your business valuable time and money.
Tape
If the urgency of restoring your data is on a subdued level, an online tape backup system will suffice. This backup system works slower than a backup appliance using an online disk, so be prepared for a deferred backup cycle, at least in comparison to the speed a disk backup would offer.
Cloud
If time isn’t really a concern and your business could go about a day with the complete absence of crucial data, an offline cloud backup will work just fine. This option should be chosen carefully though. Sometimes, even if an organization believes that it can do without its data for a day or two, this assumption may not be entirely accurate.
Everything
All three options – disk, tape and cloud – can be implemented at once in most backup appliance implementations. You may have a short, rather instantaneous, time window for restores for a portion of your data (disk), several minutes for yet another portion (tape), or up to a day for some other data (cloud). Costs could determine using a mix of media. As the price of disk drops, and as the pipe speeds increase, cloud may soon match tape retrieval speeds. For now, though, tape’s streaming speeds still provide a quicker restore for larger files over typical cloud connectivity.
At STORServer, we go the extra mile to assist your organization in choosing the right backup mix and know that backup location is an important component. Our Solution Wizard is designed to keep an entire list of important factors in mind. After all, not every organization has the same backup and recovery needs, and who would know this better than we would! Contact us today for a solution that fits in perfectly with the requirements of your organization.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series. For more information on how to select an enterprise backup appliance.
