FalconStor Blog
Data Backup (14)
In his web research, Chris found that tape tends to be a better option for smaller IT shops, where performance requirements are lower. For those larger organizations with higher performance and capacity requirements, disk-based solutions with deduplication are a better choice. Of course, results can differ due to various vendor prices.
Chris goes on to highlight both sides of the argument, charting the price and performance of the various infrastructures. He makes the case for both tape and disk-based solutions as it relates to the size of the environment. He also goes on to state that tape is not dead, because it can be used for backup in smaller environments or as the archival system for larger environments. To get the full story on the backup debate check out Chris’ post “Tape versus disk: The backup war exposed.”
Armed with the right tools, the backup team can analyze all types of useful information that can benefit the organization. In addition, the business value is captivating, since the data is already there and the storage cost has already been paid. The deduplication repository includes a single instance of all the data, as well as an index of what is being stored and how many copies are being backed up.
Chris makes the prediction that data mining may become a standard feature of backup in the near future. This is because there is a strong business use case to mine information from the data that is already being stored. It surely would be a shame to let that data just waste away there until there is a need for a restore.
To learn more about the benefits of using backups as a source for data mining, check out Chris’ full Computerworld post.
FalconStor solutions have been recognized by two leading industry publications. The FalconStor® VTL earned the top spot in the Best Backup & Recovery Solution category at the 2012 the Network World Asia (NWA) Information Management Awards. In addition, FalconStor was recently recognized in CRN’s 2012 Virtualization List as a top 100 vendor.
The NWA Information Management Awards recognize Asia’s leaders in the Information Security, Storage, and Data Management industry. NWA selects award winners based on marketplace reputation, product features, technology/brand acceptance, user feedback, and contributing factors such as durability, scalability, and quality of services.
The annual CRN Virtualization 100 List is comprised of vendors with the most innovative and forward-thinking approaches to selling products and services through the IT channel. Featuring the top vendors in the virtualization space, the 100 List assists solution providers in evaluating products and programs that help organizations take advantage of the ease, flexibility, scalability, elasticity and cost savings that virtualization has to offer.
FalconStor offers another look into the mind of its consumers with its latest customer success video. In this five minute interview, Strand Associates’ Justin Bell, network engineer, shares how FalconStor CDP technology allowed this large engineering firm to shrink its recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), ensuring data availability and business continuity.
Strand Associates, a multidisciplinary engineering firm, has offices throughout the Midwest United States. Its IT infrastructure consists of Microsoft Windows servers (2008 R2, 2008, and 2003) spread across nine office locations. Users in each of these offices need to access files on various servers from other offices at any given time.
Backup is Old School Featured
The traditional approach to this problem is to temporarily disable write access to data during the backup, by quiescing the application or
by having the operating system enforce exclusive read access. This works when regular downtime is acceptable, but 24/7 systems cannot bear service stoppages. To avoid downtime, high-availability systems may instead perform the backup on a snapshot—a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in time—and allow applications to continue writing to their data. In some systems once the initial snapshot is taken of a data set, subsequent snapshots copy the changed data only and use a system of pointers to reference the initial snapshot.
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