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Transforming data protection for SMBs
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Whether a data loss leads to a few inconvenienced customers or a major security breach, the results are never good, and some companies don't bounce back. Why? Many have poor disaster recovery plans, or they focus on disaster recovery but overlook business continuity. Others understand the value of backup but create plans that fail to reflect their business needs.
Tape technology has long been the standard for protecting business data. It’s portable, it has a long shelf life, it’s cost-effective and it can hold a lot of data. And for these reasons, it’s still the best choice for certain small businesses, depending on their recovery needs. But for other small and medium businesses, or SMBs, a tape-based approach alone may not meet their demand for business continuity. That’s why the best backup and restore plans today don’t use just tape—they incorporate disk, too. This two-tiered approach might be the only way to get the specific data SMBs need back fast enough to keep their businesses up and running—and now it’s actually an affordable strategy.
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Is Tape Enough for You? |
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First, you have to determine whether tape-based backup is suitable for your company. Consider the following questions:
- What is your recovery time objective, or RTO? In other words, how soon after downtime do you need access to data and files? If you need access within hours or minutes—if your business can’t run without quick access—then tape alone isn’t going to help you. It may be stored off site, and you might need days to sift through tape data to find what you need.
- What is your recovery point objective, or RPO? How recent does your recovered data need to be? Tape backups typically occur once a day, at the end of the day. Files that may have been created just a few hours ago will typically not be backed up on tape and available in case an outage occurs.
A tape-based solution is a great choice for weekly backups of non-business-critical servers. It might work well for small companies that have one or two servers, less than 500 GB of data and a backup routine that can be managed by a non-technical employee. But if your business requires daily backups of multiple servers and fast restores that need to be managed by a small staff, a disk-to-tape (D2T) strategy will quickly become unmanageable and put your company at risk. Instead, the ideal backup and recovery plan for your company might incorporate both disk and tape.
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Why D2D2T Is Better |
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In a disk-to-disk-to-tape, or D2D2T, routine, your servers are backed up on a daily basis (possibly multiple times per day) to a disk-based device. Ideally, you can use your current backup software to automate this process to relieve the burden on your IT staff. Then, you copy the prior week’s daily backup jobs to a tape device and send your tape cartridges to a secure, off-site location for long-term storage. In the event of a disaster, you get the best of both worlds: the fast RTO and RPO enabled by disk, and the affordable long-term, off-site protection of tape.
With the right expertise, it’s possible to cobble together a D2D2T solution. But most SMBs don’t have an abundance of IT expertise that can devote time to the research and testing required to build a solution from scratch. Fortunately, HP offers a D2D2T solution, specifically for SMBs, that takes the guesswork out of the backup process.
“The D2D2T solution from HP helped us dramatically improve our data backup and recovery speed while still being able to have a tape copy to move to a secure off-site spot,” says Brian Campbell, IT director of Barker Implement in Creston, Iowa. “We definitely need both types of protection—business continuity and disaster recovery.”
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Finding the Best D2D2T Solution |
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The HP D2D Backup Systems are designed to work with existing LTO Ultrium tape drives. It is a virtual tape library, or VTL, providing enterprise-class features—including automation, backup consolidation and data deduplication (on select models) to eliminate redundant storage—that meet both the budget and performance needs of SMBs. It’s easy to configure, allowing SMBs to go from out of the box to backing up servers in less than an hour. Because it’s compatible with existing Ethernet networks and leading backup software, it minimizes deployment costs and downtime associated with implementing many other disk-based backup solutions.
“The HP D2D2T system works right across the network and we just kept the program we’ve been using for years,” says Khristine Jacobsen, IT director of the Myrtue Medical Center in Harlan, Iowa. “All in all, it was a simple transition that’s already saving us a lot of time and money.”
HP offers a range of products designed to meet the data protection and capacity needs of SMBs. All of the following solutions support tape copy to HP LTO-2, LTO-3 and LTO-4 tape drives:
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| In the past, SMBs were stuck in a quandary: A D2D2T approach was not only difficult to build from scratch, but it was also cost-prohibitive. Today, those obstacles are gone. HP’s D2D2T backup solution puts both disaster recovery and business continuity within reach of every SMB that needs them. |
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Additional information |
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