Backup Overview
The demand for data storage capacity has grown at an annual
compound rate of 30 percent over the past 10 years. For many companies and organizations, data now represents one of their most important assets, perhaps the most important. Such data can consist of databases, medical images, data archives, CAD or other drawings, financial records, customer claims, inventory management, key applications-the list goes on.
The damage created by losing this data is significant. For smaller companies, such losses may be no more than an inconvenience or the loss of a few hours. For larger companies, catastrophic data loss can cost millions of dollars, cause the company to lose customers or even fail.
The causes of such losses are well known. Networks can suffer from component failure, power outages, natural disasters, malicious mischief such as Denial of Service (DoS), human error or outright sabotage. Desktop and notebook computers attached to the network directly or remotely can also suffer these losses in addition to accidents, theft and sabotage.
As a result, data recovery and restore plans are becoming an integral part of many business plans. Increasingly, IT departments and MIS managers recognize the inevitability of data loss. For them it is merely a question of when, how serious, and how long the downtime.
Therefore, IT administrators must confront several major issues when developing their backup policies, including:
The rapidly increasing volume of data.
The need for 24/7 data availability on a worldwide basis.
The shrinking window of time available to backup huge amounts of data.
The lack of centralized control and oversight in distributed systems- employees in different departments or locations can independently swap out tape backups, back up their own work or forget to backup up their data.
The increased difficulties and enormous costs of instituting an enterprise-wide automatic backup system to ensure all data is consistently and reliably backed up to a central data area.
The increased rate of data failure caused by network complexities, viruses and worms.
The common occurrence of human error, whether it's inadvertently deleting files or performing an operation that causes a system crash.
Supporting both Tape and Disk to Disk (D2D) backup, our backup solution is holistic and reliable
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