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What you need to know about data center backup in Davis
Data centers may be giving way to the cloud, but there are still quite a few companies running them and this means that there are still quite a few companies that need to manage data center backups. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data center backup in Davis.
Data center backups are not just about data
When you run your own data center, you are responsible for backing up everything you need to keep your operations running. A large part of this will, of course, be data, but it will also include resources (such as operating systems, applications and configurations) and the infrastructure itself.
You do not necessarily have to back up (or archive) everything, although this is far from unusual, but you do need to back up your core data. This includes data required to keep on the right side of the law, such as your tax records.
Data center backups can be very complex
Leaving aside the issue of infrastructure (including and especially mobile devices), data center backups can still be massively complex. These days, even SMBs can be running multiple operating systems (e.g. Windows on the front-end and Linux on the back-end) and countless applications plus they will also usually generate vast quantities of data, some of which will be subject to special legal requirements (e.g. sensitive data). That’s before you get to the issue of virtualized environments.
This means that not only do companies, even SMBs, need to manage them with the help of appropriate tools, but they may also actually need to use a variety of tools to do the same job. For example, you may find that, no matter how hard you look, you just cannot find one piece of data center backup management software which does everything you need it to do. The typical workaround would be to have one piece of data center backup management software that does most of what you want it to do, plus one or more additional tools to plug the gap(s).
Choosing the right data center backup management tools
If you are on the smaller side of the SMB range, you may want to look at hardware-based solutions or cloud-based solutions (Backup-as-a-Service). The former are still convenient (particularly as they often come with storage). They have, however, largely fallen out of favor in preference to BaaS as they are very vulnerable to failure. They also take up a lot of space on-site and this can be an issue even in data centers.
This leaves software-based solutions and hybrid solutions that combine software and BaaS. These are likely to be the only feasible options for anything other than the smallest of SMBs. Most software/hybrid solutions offer an evaluation period (usually 30 days) and you should make use of this to do thorough testing to make sure that a vendor’s support for any given platform is as robust as their marketing suggests.
Speaking of support, it’s also a good idea to check what ongoing help you can expect from the vendor. It may be a cliche, but modern data centers really do tend to resemble spider’s webs, which means that a tiny change in one part of the data center can lead to a breakdown in a completely different part and hence cause your data center backup software to malfunction. You are therefore likely to need ongoing support from somewhere and ideally, this will be a combination of the software vendor and your data center backup partner.
Choosing the right storage for your data center
Most data center managers will be taking two backups, one local and one off-site. The local one at least will usually be taken to physical media and, these days, the choice is essentially between tapes, hard drives, and SSDs. Tapes have long been favored for their reliability, but their slowness is increasingly becoming an issue. Hard drives are faster but are prone to failures. SSDs are extremely fast, but, while they are becoming more affordable, they are still expensive and when they fail, they tend to do so without warning.
Increasing numbers of organizations, even SMBs, are adopting a “disk-to-tape” approach of running data through SSDs, which buffer, compress and deduplicate it before transferring it to tape.
For your off-site data center backup, you have the choice between physical media or the cloud. The former may have a higher degree of security, but this has to be set against the risk of delayed recovery due to having to fetch physical media from an off-site storage location.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data center backup partner in Davis, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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