Backup & Recovery Solutions

Traditional backup and recovery software is fast evolving into a more comprehensive recovery management solution that recognises the need for better and more targeted performance and improved management.

For the mid market and large organisation legacy software and backup technologies cannot deliver the service levels demanded by the business both in terms of backup window and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).

Given the rising costs of managing the backup and recovery environment and the demands for improved performance and reliability, there are two key emerging developments that should be considered:

• Tiered backup and recovery
• Strategic outsourcing

The organisation needs to decide the appropriate level of backup and recovery performance required for each class of data. Fundamental to the design of any new backup and recovery environment is a Service Catalogue that defines the service levels required for each area of the business or class of data. The solution may involve disk-based and tape-based backup, use of snapshots and continuous data protection. The use of disk-based backup is driving de-duplication which can also provide low cost replication and remote vaulting.

Strategic outsourcing is gaining interest as advanced management tools and reduced communication costs make remote management of all aspects of the backup and recovery environment a reality, delivering both cost savings and significantly improved service levels.

Tectrade

Tectrade follows a structured approach to designing backup and recovery technology solutions. The starting point is to baseline the existing environment to understand the current costs of running the environment and both the current and target service levels.

Typical issues with legacy backup include:

• Slow and unreliable restores
• Increasing time spent on administration
• High tape drive and media usage
• Long backup windows
• High bandwidth usage
• Poor disaster recovery planning

With annual data growth rates of 60% or more, most mid-market and large organisations with distributed solutions or older enterprise solutions will face one or more of these issues.

The solutions we design have similar objectives in terms of delivering business value but are presented as either customer managed solutions or remotely managed solutions.

Business Value

• Reduce management and administration time
• Reduce tape drive and media usage
• 100% backup success
• Create a single point of management for backup and recovery
• Introduce centralised disk-to-disk-to-tape based backup
• De-duplicate data to improve utilisation of storage assets and faster recovery
• Deploy advanced software database agents to automate online backup
• Build service tiers for backup and recovery based on the importance of the data to the business
• Store a complete duplicate copy of backup data offsite and update automated DR plan on a daily basis
• Incorporate CDP and snapshots where aggressive RTO and RPO is required