Enterprise Backup Solutions
Backup and recovery is a dynamic challenge with ever-changing needs. It’s time to get one step ahead and leave reactive plans in the dust.
The challenges of data management and backup
Organizations are challenged to meet their data availability and management needs as technology changes. Adding to this pressure is the speed at which they have to change due to new market requirements, evolving global supply chain dynamics, and competitors’ moves. All putting strain on IT to support business growth and innovation.
As more and newer technologies are added to meet the organizations’ needs and demands, data is located across multiple environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud as well as remote and distributed environments, increasing the risk of data loss and compromising data recoverability. This mix of technology is unavoidable as IT evolves and new technologies are introduced to solve them. Multigenerational technology causes data and workloads to fragment across the entire data landscape, creating data silos. Ultimately, this increases the complexity and difficulty to ensure consistent recoverability across the environment.
The challenge with backup and recovery point products
Not long ago, you needed separate point products or custom scripts for almost every application, platform, or array with data that required backup. Each of these came with its own infrastructure, licensing, schedules, and unique user interfaces that IT teams were required to operate and support. Even today, we see newer vendors in the market only supporting a limited set of workloads, forcing you to either deploy multiple solutions or build your own customizations to cover all your data needs completely.
As an IT professional, you’ve experienced the pain of cobbling together multiple products to try to function as one unit. Unfortunately, it takes time, effort, and cost to keep that kind of complexity in your environment. The good news? There is a better way. Start with a comprehensive solution that not only addresses your current backup and recovery needs but is flexible and innovative enough to cover what may come tomorrow. You need to be able to account for workloads on-premises, in the cloud, across multiple clouds, and even your SaaS data sets. Native integration into these platforms and applications means that everything will work as you expect it to and deliver the kind of reporting and analytics that can help you make better-informed business decisions.
What does 3-2-1 mean for backup and recovery planning?
Best practice in backup and recovery revolves around having a 3-2-1 data backup plan. This dictates that you always maintain three copies of your data: two stored locally (but on different storage media) and one copy off-site, for a total of three.
Consider a backup copy of critical application data; your primary backup copy is stored in your data center for quick recoveries, with a second copy kept on different infrastructure (e.g., tape or disk media) to avoid a single point of failure. Then, you periodically upload your data to an off-site cloud; this would be your third copy. This copy can even be “disconnected” if needed, providing an “air gap” to protect against cyber hacking or ransomware.
The keys to success in an enterprise backup strategy
There are a few things to keep in mind when developing your enterprise backup strategy:
- The first is being able to backup your data within a defined operating window efficiently. An initial backup usually takes longer, but future incremental backups should have virtually no impact on end-users’ and backup admins’ performance.
- The need for speed is a given but being able to recover to meet business objectives quickly is also critical. And with today’s rapidly-evolving threat landscape, you need to be able to recover quickly after a ransomware attack or other event, to minimize both downtime and data loss.
- Reliability is also crucial, translating to having a robust, security-focused, and scalable data protection architecture that can expand and contract to meet evolving requirements.
- And finally, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is essential. You need a tiered storage strategy that can provide high performance aligned to the business value of your data, placing the most critical information on the highest performing infrastructure.
Types of enterprise data backup
- Full Backups
Backups for any client start with a full backup. The full backup is the baseline against which subsequent backup types are applied. - Incremental Backups
Contains only data that is either new or has changed since the most recent backup. Incremental backups typically consume far less media and place less of a burden on resources than full backups. - Differential Backups
Contains only the data that is new or has changed since the last full backup. As with incremental backups, differential backups typically consume less media and place less of a burden on resources than full backups. - Synthetic Full Backups
Consolidate the data from the latest full backup or synthetic full backup, together with any subsequent incremental backups, into a single archive file, instead of reading and backing up data directly from the client computer. Since synthetic full backups do not backup data from the client computer, this operation puts no load on the client computer. - Selective Online Full Backups
For certain databases, a selective online full backup is a full backup that you perform when the database is online. A selective copy subclient includes the data, logs, and control file. The backup is copied during the auxiliary copy operation, and you can restore it from that copy. - Block-Level Backups
Integrate snapshot technology with efficient block storage mechanisms to speed up backups.
Building an enterprise backup and recovery strategy
Having a proven, comprehensive enterprise backup and recovery solution gives you the confidence that your essential information is always available, no matter the scenario. From traditional disaster recoveries – everything from weather events and hardware failures to ransomware attacks – your entire environment needs to be protected and recoverable with a solution that’s both effective and easy to use. Some must-haves:
- Simplicity: easy for your IT staff to manage, protect, and use your data where it exists today and wherever it is moved and stored tomorrow.
- Cost-Optimized: streamlines operations and enables predictable growth and cost management, so you know what to expect and how to budget.
- Flexibility: supports your diverse environment today and the confidence to know that your future technology decisions will be supported as well.
Backup & Recovery
Backup & Recovery helps ensure data availability for all workloads across cloud and on-premises environments. Available in multiple delivery models, we allow you to manage data and workloads efficiently and securely.
- Simple, comprehensive backup and archiving from a single extensible platform and intuitive user interface.
- Trusted recovery, including rapid, granular recovery of data and applications.
- Scalable cost-optimized cloud data mobility via automatic scaling and tiering of cloud usage.
- Resilient ransomware protection and end-to-end data security with encryption.
- Flexible data reuse with copy data management to facilitate DevOps, perform security testing, test patches, and upgrades, and more.
Data backup and protection for your entire environment
Modern problems need enterprise backup and recovery. Backup & Recovery is a single, powerful backup software solution for data protection – wherever your data lives. You need a data backup and recovery solution that can keep up with you. Say goodbye to point products that increase complexity and costs. We can meet all your needs:
- CLOUD BACKUP
No more under- or overprovisioning hardware based on data growth projections. Just add the compute and storage you need, when you need it, and put an end to forklift upgrades. - CLOUD DATABASE BACKUP
Cloud databases need data protection – backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and compliance management. We make it easy to add Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) data protection to protect your critical cloud database workloads. - VIRTUAL MACHINES
Backup, recover, and manage your VMs across your environment, regardless of where they live. No more standalone point products, no more data silos, no more redundant infrastructure, and no more VM sprawl. - APPLICATIONS AND DATABASES
Our breadth and depth of support for databases and applications, including distributed applications, is unmatched. You can migrate workloads to the cloud, backup databases efficiently, and speed up access to data, all using a single solution. - ENDPOINT PROTECTION
Almost half of your data – including important customer information and intellectual property – lives on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. These devices are easy targets for cyberattacks like ransomware, making protecting them a must. Now endpoint protection can be easily installed on these devices, enabling users to recover files independently. - SECONDARY STORAGE
Our HyperScale™ X is an intuitive and easy to deploy integrated solution that accelerates hybrid cloud adoption. Available as an appliance or validated reference design, it provides unmatched scalability, security, and resiliency, allowing you to get up and running quickly and grow as your needs demand. - SAAS BACKUP
With Metallic™ SaaS, you get cost-effective and enterprise-grade data protection without the complexity. That means easy deployments, automatic upgrades, no hardware costs, and a predictable subscription model. - DISASTER RECOVERY
An easy-to-implement, extensible, and cost-effective DR solution. It allows you to protect and recover your entire data environment through a single, intuitive, web-based user interface, delivering replication, disaster recovery, compliance reporting, and more.