LAN-Free Backups
The ability to share storage devices creates economies of scale and lowers the TCO for backup solutions. Previous to the advent of SAN storage, tape devices and libraries were either configured in a one-to-one fashion or shared over an IP-based network via a media server, adding extra management complexity and extra hardware costs to the backup solution. LAN-free backups, on the other hand, move the backup traffic to the Fibre Channel network, thereby freeing up IP capacity on the LAN and boosting backup and restore performance.
Server-Free Backups
The utilization of SAN infrastructure allows environments to eliminate the need for sending data over the wire to a backup or media server. In essence, server-free or disk-to-disk backups obviate both the extra overhead involved with backup and media server infrastructures, lowering the labor and management costs involved with tape backups, and increase the capability of an environment to meet its recovery time objective (RTO). Recovery from tape is often not a viable solution for large, mission-critical environments because restoring a 1-TB database from tape generally means the application must be offline for most of a day. This is not to say that tape backups do not have a place. For audit purposes, government regulations stipulate data retention of up to seven years for some financial data sets. For environments in which restores are not time-sensitive, a tape copy is a cost-effective solution.
Solution for your network storage: network attached storage devices and storage networking
