FalconStor Blog
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) (9)
Hassle-free backup management for Microsoft Windows, Oracle Solaris, and Linux with FalconStor CDP Featured
Technology in action: How a college uses FalconStor CDP to back up and continuously protect over 2TB of student data
Here is a great real-life example of how FalconStor CDP is being used to protect and back up growing volumes of data coming from student information systems, email, and other applications running on Microsoft Windows, Solaris, and Linux platforms.
Central Carolina Community College is a growing US college with more than 12,000 students and a data management load that is expected to double in the near future. The college’s IT team of 10 manages operations across three campuses and needs to provide uninterrupted application services for students and faculty. To manage the data center’s disaster recovery processes and ensure consistent data availability, the IT team protects its Datatel Colleague system and Novell GroupWise servers with three FalconStor CDP appliances. According to the school’s IT Director Tommy Holder, the solution “does what it is supposed to do with very little management or maintenance on our part. It just runs.”
Thanks to an open, scalable architecture, FalconStor CDP easily integrates with the college’s existing IT infrastructure and provides a solid foundation for data growth.
You can read the full case study here: Central Carolina Community College
As regular readers of our blog can attest, we are serious about data protection. This seriousness stems from an understanding that when clients seek data protection and data recovery solutions, it is not just data they are looking to protect. They are making a move to protect their reputations, too. Access to data is mission critical to any business, and any error of judgment in this area can result in the company, clients and investors losing money. Therefore, all steps necessary to avoid these mishaps must be taken as a means of reputation control.
Green Your Data Center Featured
If the first 10 years of this new millennium have taught us anything, it has been that going green is in. Seemingly everyone from individuals to multinational corporations are now making decisions through green-tinted lenses. On the business side, where earning ENERGY STAR and LEED accreditation has become all the rage, the green movement has provided an opportunity to rethink what is the most environmentally conscious way to do business.
Data center energy consumption provides IT managers and businesses with an opportunity to take advantage of the green movement. Fannie Mae took to the task first, opening up the first data center to earn LEED accreditation from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2005. Within three years, 10 more data centers had joined Fannie Mae. In 2009, Citi Group's data center in Frankfurt, Germany, became the first data center in the world to earn the highest possible LEED rating (platinum). Later that year, ACT’s data center became the first American data center to achieve a platinum rating.
We have built our reputation by providing our customers with the necessary virtualization and data backup solutions to help them achieve their mission objectives and goals. For one of our customers, Earth Rangers, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating children about critical environmental issues, our Continuous Data Protector (CDP) proved to be exactly what the organization needed to contribute to its green goals.
Recently, I joined Craig Peterson on his weekly podcast, Tech Talk with Craig Peterson, to discuss the ever-changing world of disaster recovery, disk storage and data protection.
My time on the show allowed me to reflect on the dramatic changes we’ve seen in data protection and data recovery since they became hot button issues thirty years ago. Data protection used to involve backing up data on tape drives, which would then be shipped off-site for storage, on a nightly basis. If something were to happen on-site where data needed to be recovered, users would be limited to a snapshot of what happened yesterday. They would lose any data created since the previous day’s data had been stored the night before.
In today’s fast-paced world, this method of data protection and recovery would not suffice as organizations, especially small-to-medium businesses, cannot afford to lose any data. Luckily, advancements in technology have provided us with more effective and efficient means of storing and recovering data.
As our FalconStor blog surfers know, one of the topics we frequently discuss is continuous data protection (CDP), which is a process that allows users to restore data to any point in time, as computer data is constantly backed up by trickling all data changes made to an off-site, virtual location. This data is fully protected in the event of an IT issue on-site, and is immediately available for recall.
Even with its steep cost, CDP adds a great deal of value to a user or an organization. For business, it gives management the peace of mind the data surrounding their transactions will always be there. As I noted in the podcast, this is especially important given that recent studies show nine out of 10 businesses who cannot recover data after 10 days go out of business. For hospitals and the healthcare industry, having 24/7 date data can literally mean the difference between life and death. For college students, CDP gives them a backup copy of their final project if their laptop hard drive is erased the morning it is due.
So what’s the catch? Data protection has come a long way, and we at FalconStor are proud to be offering our resellers and customers a solution that helps them though the new age of data protection. Innovative data protection and recovery processes have given users the assurance they need regarding the safety and ability to recall data, resulting in a paradigm shift from a data backup mindset to one of data recovery.
Can you tell us about your recent stories of migrating from tape to CDP?
