Data Center Backup Auburn

Business data backups can be complicated enough in the cloud.  If you’re running a data center, the complexity can increase massively.  The good news is that data center backups can be managed very effectively as long as you have the right strategy and the right tools for the job (and possibly the right data center backup vendor on your side).  With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data center backup in Auburn.

Data centers may look organized from the outside, but they can be very chaotic from the inside.  Those neat rows of servers, cables, and cooling are often home to a whole plethora of environments, operating systems, applications, and data, plus these days, there will probably be at least some degree of virtualization in the mixture.  What’s more, unless you are in the process of dismantling your data center (for example completing a move to the cloud), the assets (digital and physical) will probably be in a fairly regular state of flux.

You can only back up a data center effectively if you know what is actually in it.  This means that effective asset tracking is vital to the smooth running of a data center.  If you know (or think) that your business is lacking in this area, then you could start by aiming to identify what is most essential for the health of the business and making sure that these assets are tracked effectively and then expanding the system to include the rest.

It is, however, advisable to make it a priority to get all assets (physical and digital) under effective management as quickly as possible as, frankly, when it comes to complex ecosystems such as data centers, you may only find out that something is important once it has been removed because you didn’t think it mattered.

Even though most SMBs operate to tight budgets, you need to treat the purchase of data center backup management tools as an investment.  It’s what could potentially save you from a loss of productivity which could cripple your business.  When it comes to managing data center backups, the key tools fall into one of three main types, hardware-, cloud- and software-based solutions.  There are also hybrid solutions that combine elements of software with elements of the cloud.

Hardware-based solutions and cloud-based solutions (Backup-as-a-Service) are only likely to be suitable for companies running fairly small-scale data centers.  Both options are simple and convenient but overall BaaS tends to be the preferred choice as it is perceived as more robust than hardware-based solutions (which are vulnerable to physical failure), plus it frees up space in the data center.

Software-based solutions (and hybrid solutions) tend to be the options of choice for companies with more complex operations as they offer the highest degree of control and customizability.  You may, however, find that you need to invest in more than one data center backup management solution to get all the functionality you need for your situation.  Typically this will involve purchasing one “main” solution and then one or more “lighter” solutions to fill in any gaps.  You may, however, only find this out once you’ve discovered that a vendor’s idea of support of an asset is somewhat different from yours.

Rather than find this out the hard way, you need to make the most of the evaluation period offered by most software vendors and use it to give any proposed software solution a rigorous workout under conditions that replicate your real-world usage.  Since the average 30-day evaluation period can run out surprisingly quickly, it’s advisable to have a plan of action in place before you download it and this should include details of who will test what, how and when (and make sure that they actually have time to do it).

For a while it looked like hard drives might push out tapes as the backup medium of choice, but this now looks increasingly unlikely.  Instead, companies are increasingly using the “disk-to-tape” strategy of running data through an SSD before loading it onto tape.  The SSD buffers, cleans and compresses the data, often improving its quality significantly and the tape provides a storage medium that is more reliable and robust and less expensive than hard drives and SSDs.

The cloud is now increasingly used to hold the off-site copy of a data center backup.  While it lacks the “physical firewall” effect offered by traditional storage media, it makes for more convenient and quicker recoveries.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data center backup partner in Auburn, please click here now to contact Salient IT.