Scaling Data and System Backup and Recovery

Businesses today rely on technologies to keep teams connected to the applications, data and devices they share. Many businesses are experiencing rapid increase in data volumes, resulting in additional challenges for their busy IT departments. In addition, IT administrators are tasked with meeting increasingly strict recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), as well as seeking products to alleviate the workload and allow them to spend more time on strategic initiatives.

To address these challenges, IT organizations need a dynamic, scalable backup and recovery strategy. For example, many organizations rely on their off-the-shelf backup tool to protect a Microsoft Exchange server, Oracle database, LAMP stack, storage server and Active Directory. Over time, this same company may grow exponentially to include tens or hundreds of servers spread across various offices and remote sites.

The solution means leveraging products that scale to allow IT organizations to reap immediate benefits while managing growing volumes of information and meeting demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Centralized Administration: Data Management in Control
As the environment expands and becomes more complex, the challenge of protecting the data and systems increases. Along with redundant Active Directory and application servers, organizations require redundant media servers for storing data backups and system recovery points to achieve the highest levels of data and system protection.

To that end, backup and recovery tools must include the capability to synchronize and manage data backups on multiple media servers and provide a central point of administration and control for job processing and load balancing. Whether an organization has just three media servers or more than 100, a central administration capability is essential to manage data protection operations across the entire backup environment.

A scalable backup and recovery solution with centralized administration capabilities offer additional benefits to remote offices and departments, enabling administrators to continuously protect data from remote office servers to a central location at the corporate office, where data can be reliably backed up and stored. By eliminating off site tape backups and centralizing backups, IT organizations can minimize the costs associated with hardware, media and administration investments at these remote offices and departments.

Furthermore, new advances in backup are delivering LAN-free backup solutions that allow multiple distributed backup servers to centralize storage devices that are connected over a SAN for greater performance, efficiency, and fault tolerance. This helps lower the total cost of ownership.

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