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Take one look at the critical information that flows through your company’s branch and remote offices, and it quickly becomes clear that data protection and data growth are not just data center issues.
In fact, according to recent analyst studies, more than two-thirds of company data sits on laptops and servers located away from the main office.
That’s a lot of data. And that’s why smaller businesses are waking up to the importance of data protection, recognizing that failure to provide adequate protection for your data could spell the end of your business should disaster strike. |
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Working at a branch or remote office definitely presents a unique set of challenges:
- When can you find the time for a suitable backup window?
- How can you improve data availability for faster data restoration?
- How do you account for the cost of transmitting data over your wide area network (WAN) or having to courier backup tapes to the data center?
- With more data and applications out at the branch, how do you give users reliable access to data when they need it?
- As IT complexity increases, how do you best address data and application growth without overburdening already-busy users or adding overhead to your business?
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| The answers can be found through proven storage solutions that take advantage of technologies used by larger enterprises. These solutions are now gaining popularity among smaller businesses and in remote and branch offices. |
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Until recently, only the largest companies could afford to implement data replication for disaster-recovery purposes, primarily because replicating large volumes of data backup between sites is typically bandwidth intensive and requires more expensive links.
Consider that old news, thanks to HP StorageWorks D2D2500 and D2D4000 Backup Systems that offer dynamic deduplication capabilities with the ability to replicate data between systems.
Simply put, dynamic deduplication reduces the bandwidth and cost needed to create and maintain duplicate datasets over networks. Once a replica of the data backup set has been created on a remote appliance, all that is required to keep the replica identical to the source is the automatic, periodic copying and movement of new data segments. With such small amounts of data being transmitted asynchronously, low-bandwidth networks offer sufficient performance and a much lower cost solution.
The benefits of low-bandwidth replication are welcome in these budget-conscious times. Not only do you reduce the costs of central management by allowing low-bandwidth replication across lower costs lines—such as commonly found 1.5 or 2 megabit T1 or E1 links—but you also eliminate the need for local super-users to manage each remote office backup.
Plus, with data deduplication, up to 50 times more data can be retained on a disk for longer periods of time, so you can recover lost or corrupt files from multiple backup points fast, without resorting to tape restore. |
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Storage needs at branch and remote offices are growing exponentially just as budgets are tightening more than ever, prompting the search for more efficient storage strategies.
Direct-attached storage is frequently the solution of choice. Yet all too often, this strategy means buying more servers to have more direct-attached storage. However, the limits of standard capacity, coupled with high management costs and low utilization, offer a poor return on investment. Often, contrary to good business practices, the choice is made to delete older files just to make space for new data.
As data grows and new servers are deployed, the requirement to improve efficiency becomes greater. These factors are driving the need to virtualize servers and deploy shared network storage. Many businesses have found the answer in an optimized infrastructure like the HP BladeSystem connected to HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Arrays (MSA2000). Together, these integrated server and storage solutions can reduce costs and enable growth of both physical and virtual server environments.
Best of all, you can start with a small disk array configuration—and grow as your needs grow with iSCSI, serial-attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel options attached to your servers. To add to the flexibility, the new HP StorageWorks MSA2300fc G2 offers you a choice of serial ATA (SATA) and SAS hard drives in both small and large form factor configurations, so you can invest in the technology that best matches your data and application requirements. |
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