In part 1 of our “5 Ways Disk Backup Can Help Your Business” blog series, we discussed how a disk-based backup solution helps businesses get faster backups as their data grows and in part 2 of this series, we discussed how to avoid failed tape backups and restores by using a disk backup solution. In part 3, we discuss how a disk backup system with data deduplication provides better, faster offsite disaster recovery.
The need for fast and simple restores to recover data during a site disaster is a business imperative for many companies. With tape-based data protection, the longest delays in recovering from a system or site disaster are often due to the need to acquire, load, and restore data from offsite tapes. Recovering the right tape from offsite can take a day or up to several days. But tapes are often lost, misplaced, or are otherwise faulty – and the time it takes to complete a recovery operation increases considerably if one or more of the backup tapes is found to be corrupted or damaged. When this occurs, older backup tapes must be used, resulting in a longer overall recovery process – and the data finally restored to users and applications may be weeks old.
Fast and Simple Disaster Recovery Using Disk Backup System
With a disk backup system with data deduplication, an optional offsite disk-based backup appliance can replace offsite tape and provide faster, more reliable data recovery. The byte-level changes from backup to backup on a local site system are replicated efficiently to an off-site system. Since it is only these byte-level changes that are replicated, typically only about 2% of the backup traverses the WAN. In the event of a primary site disaster, it takes just a few seconds to initiate a data recovery process at the second site using the existing backup application.
In addition to facilitating the replacement of offsite tape, certain disk backup with data deduplication systems (such as ExaGrid) also provide proprietary “instant DR” technology for even faster recovery from an outage or disaster. With “instant DR,” when a new backup at the primary site is replicated to the remote site by sending over just the bytes that have changed, the remote site takes these changed bytes and combines them with previous backups to create a complete copy of the most recent backup on the remote site. Keeping this most recent backup intact and ready to be restored makes disaster recoveries much faster, giving the customer “instant DR” should the need arise.
ExaGrid provides a disk backup with data deduplication system which enables fast offsite DR. An excellent example of an ExaGrid customer using these DR capabilities is The Coastal Bank. They credit receipt of the highest Possible FDIC regulatory rating of “1” in part to use of ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system. In The Coastal Bank case study, they describe how restores that previously took an hour or more, and much longer if restoring from an offsite storage location, are accomplished in as fast as 5 minutes.
ExaGrid also continues to stay on the cutting edge of offsite disk-based data protection through the support of technologies such as Symantec OpenStorage API. Using ExaGrid disk backup system with Symantec OpenStorage API provides a number of benefits, including unified control and access of backup data stored on both local and remote ExaGrid systems, varied amounts of retention for on-site vs. off-site systems, simplified disaster recovery, and shorter backup windows. For additional information on ExaGrid disk backup with data deduplication system and Symantec OpenStorage API, please visit:
ExaGrid 
and Symantec Backup Exec 2010 OST Data Sheet
ExaGrid and Symantec NetBackup OST Data Sheet