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The need to be close to customers, manufacturing facilities and specialized labor have required organizations to extend the traditional concept of “headquarters” to offices and factories hundreds or even thousands of miles away. However, along with the opportunities that come with workforce globalization, come the realities of dealing with data that sprawls across the organization. Whether the data is at the Munich branch or at HQ in New York, it is equally susceptible to loss, requiring that data recovery and security plans apply to all parts of the organization, regardless of location.
To protect company data and ensure its availability to users, IT organizations have been conflicted between two backup approaches. The first approach, local tape backup, requires that tape libraries be present wherever there are servers in racks. Local area network (LAN) access to the servers gives administrators fast data backup and recovery. The newer approach, centralized backup, puts high-density tape libraries in one location to which data from servers around the world is backed up. While centralized backup requires less hardware, reduces administration time, and solves the security problem associated with loose tape media, it can introduce greater bandwidth consumption and longer backup/restore windows. Because of these issues, centralized backup has been a leap some managers have not been willing to make.
With the right wide-area data services (WDS) technology, a more scalable and secure data protection model can be implemented without the expense of an expanded wide area network (WAN). WDS is a superset of several network acceleration categories, including data reduction and compression as well as protocol and application optimization. WDS can eliminate the bandwidth and time constraints that stall many centralized backup deployments and are the primary enabler of many technology consolidation projects.
The pioneer in WDS, Riverbed® offers a family of appliances designed to work with your existing data and network infrastructure. Riverbed Steelhead® appliances can accelerate your centralized backup and recovery processes, reduce bandwidth usage, and enable data and IT consolidation. The Steelhead appliance frees business from the constraints of latency and bandwidth, allowing your company to save millions of dollars by utilizing centralized technology solutions with unlimited scalability.
This whitepaper will help you understand the tremendous shift occurring in data protection. Leveraging the capabilities of WDS, storage specialists are replacing local tape libraries with more scalable and secure network-based systems. Security analysts are no longer drafting extensive procedural documents to manage a growing swarm of loose tape media. CIOs are revising disaster recovery SLAs to reflect new levels of reliability, and CFOs are planning budgets on more practical technology growth. The Steelhead appliance will not only enable IT organizations to efficiently manage the increasingly critical technology infrastructure of today’s business, but will also facilitate compliance with new government regulations mandating the security of sensitive company data.
Though a very small bandwidth consumer, the local backup model is rapidly being supplanted by more manageable architectures. IT departments are finding the headaches and costs associated with maintaining an increasingly complex matrix of distributed tape technologies can be alleviated by performing backup over the WAN. But the move toward replacing the local backup model is also driven by the security implications of keeping sensitive data on thousands of tape cartridges at remote offices across the world. Tapes can be lost or stolen, compromising not only disaster recovery efforts but the protection of company data from competitors, thieves or others intending harm to the company or its customers.
Providing better control over loose media and reducing administrative overhead with standardized tape media, centralized backup provides a more secure and scalable approach to data protection. Centralized backup can be successfully deployed over metropolitan-area networks (MANs), where low-latency, high-bandwidth branch inter-connectivity has provided a feasible, low-cost medium for bulk data transport. Extending this model beyond the MAN, however, introduces high connectivity costs and latency issues that cannot be overcome with more bandwidth alone. IT departments have had to look to smarter technology to help scale data protection architectures beyond a few city blocks to anywhere in the world.
For faster and more reliable access to protected data, backup technology has moved beyond tape cartridges to spinning disk. Using disk-to-disk and more scalable volume management systems, technologies like Network Appliance’s NearStore VTL allow low-latency data to be backed up or restored in a fraction of the time required with tape. And with specialized support for transactional databases that allows for differential point-in-time snapshots, software like Network Appliance’s SnapManager or EMC’s Replication Manager further reduces data backup and recovery windows. These innovations open the way for IT organizations to build security and scalability into their data protection architecture. Yet without a WDS strategy to extend these benefits to distant remote branches, centralized backup cannot operate beyond the MAN without also creating congested pipes and soaring bandwidth costs.
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