Backup and Recovery Options

One fundamental benefit of networking storage devices is the positive implications for backup strategies. In addition to sharing backup resources, such as tape libraries and SANs, coupled with the advent of serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) disk drives and snap technologies, enable the creation of highly customized backup and recovery strategies that offer the business increased availability and uptime are less difficult and less expensive to implement.

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