Way out of Complexity: Backup Appliances

Companies have always had account ledger books to keep a record of transactions that have happened. These have served as a knowledge base for the company to track their growth and improvement year on year. Howeveras the business grew, these books started taking up more & more space. This made life very complicated for the business to go back and search for any particular document they wanted. As this was done manually, it became cumbersome process

With advent of technology we have come to the times where all these problems can be resolved with technical expertise. Although there are various solutions available in the market, companies need to understand the different elements that help to backing up data securely.

Primary storage:

Backup is an integral part of a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy, companies have been implementing best of the solutions to make sure their storage systems are at place. However over a period of time, multiple factors led to data-deluge and a lot of redundant data started accumulating in both online & offline storage. With this companies were compelled to invest in additional storage. This further encouraged companies to start focusing on Deduplication to optimize the storage cost.

Understanding Deduplication:

Virtual tape libraries and other platforms that have interfaces, like network file systems, do not contain backup software. Businesses to avoid loss of data would save it on different network folders and cause excessive deduplication.

Since this does serve its purpose in entirety, a separate backup software is required. Because most IT stores are highly virtualized, deduplication provides the ability to significantly reduce the volume of physically stored data. This makes the appliance model very suitable for storing long-term backups that can also serve as archives.

It works directly with the application or server to protect virtual machines (VMs), databases and other application data. The appliance provides all the features needed for future data recovery, such as cataloging, indexing and searching.

Role dedicated backup appliance:

An appliance virtually eliminates the hassle of designing and implementing a backup architecture. Although not suitable for all scenarios, many IT organizations can benefit operationally and perhaps even financially from the implementation of an integrated backup appliance.

Secondary storage:

These appliances include features such as backup, archive, disaster recovery, copy data management (CDM), and test / dev data. However, this device model is not suitable for everyone. For example, it may be more practical for SMEs to use cloud-based backups or a product that writes to a local disk.

Integrated devices could be useful for businesses with scalability or management issues. Scaling primary backups may be problematic. Secondary applications in this case, can help with operational and financial growth. An integrated backup solution significantly reduces the work load by minimizing and eliminating operational aspects of the storage system.

To enhance data backup, companies have implemented end-to-end data security like ransomware protection

Some features described here may also apply across backup environments.

Fast Deployment: Appliances are provided as a "black box" that does not need to be assembled from components. The vendor handles the integration and selects the right server and storage components to work with the backup software.

Easy Deployment: The customer simply buys the backup appliance, puts it in the rack, and turns it on. The goal is to make it easier to deploy, which should only take a few minutes or hours instead of a few days.

The vendor manages it: As part of a turnkey system, vendors manage the product from an infrastructure perspective. This means they replace broken components and manage software upgrades and patches. As the sole source of all data in the enterprise, the backup system is a sought-after target for hackers. That's why it's important to patch it completely.

Unified licensing model: Usually, licensing models are based on either the capacity or cost of individual nodes. Features are usually bundled in the cost and not broken down separately.

Single Point of Truth (SPOT): By using a backup appliance - especially a scale-out product - companies can create a single point of truth (SPOT) for backup data. This is true even if the physical appliances are distributed in branch configurations because the backup metadata continues to be centrally stored.

Cloud Extensibility: Many products now support backup extension to the public cloud. Initially, these solutions only used the cloud as a backup repository but now there are products that can run virtual appliances in the cloud and gain access to the backup to restore VMs or perform workload migrations.

Secondary data usage: A key benefit of the backup

Appliance model is that it can be used to host active data. With server virtualization, the appliance can act as a data store and be used to launch VMs based on the backups. This is a powerful way to recover data or prove the validity of backups.

Nikhil Korgaonkar
Regional Sales Director India & SAARC, Arcserve