Disk-based backup solutions provider, ExaGrid says it will shake up the South African market following its partnership with SYSDBA.
The two companies unveiled their reseller agreement at Monte Casino, Johannesburg, yesterday, with ExaGrid - headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts - saying it also hopes to grow its customer base in SA.
Speaking at the event, Andy Palmer, sales director international at ExaGrid, said among the challenges South African CIOs are facing include keeping pace with the capacity to protect data; the need to reduce backup recovery times; unacceptable levels of data loss or downtime; as well as the rising backup hardware costs.
Quoting a study by the Enterprise Strategy Group, Palmer said most organisations blame about 15% of failure rates on backup and 10% to 50% of failure rates on restores.
“Data up to one-year-old has a 10% to 15% failure rate, and the failure rate of data five or more years old is 40% to 50%.”
He also revealed that 34% of companies that back up data to tape do not test the backup, while almost three quarters of those that test the backup experience failure. On the other hand, he added, 65% of companies do not have adequate backup protection on virtual environments.
In one highly-publicised incident, he explained, a 2007 data backup failure by the Alaska Department of Revenue wiped out data on a $38 billion account, and it cost the state $200 000 to restore the data.
“According to the National Computer Security Association, without adequate backup, it takes 21 days and $19 000 to recreate 20MB of lost accounting data, and 42 days and $98 000 to recreate 20MB of lost engineering data.”
Modernising backup
Palmer also noted that, in the past several years, the pace of data growth has also put increasing pressure on businesses to fix and modernise their backups.
“As data increases and more data resides on servers, executing successful daily backups is becoming more difficult,” Palmer pointed out.
He added that, for years, organisations have relied, at least in part, on tape as a key method of backing up critical data. “However, managing tape and restoring data from tape can be cumbersome, unreliable and time-consuming. Backup times that exceed the available window leave critical data unprotected, and many companies have yet to consider the ramifications of a failed restore until it was too late.”
According to Palmer, companies that have already moved to disk-to-disk-to-tape are limited by retention periods of typically one to two weeks, as the cost of disk becomes prohibitive for greater periods, and they still have the burden of managing offsite tape.
The move to server virtualisation is also driving a need to more efficiently back up redundant data from virtualised servers, he said.
Palmer believes disk backup with deduplication changes the economics of disk-based data protection.
“Most importantly, it makes the transition from tape- to disk-based protection affordable, as it drives the total cost of ownership for disk-based backup closer to that of a tape strategy.”
Also speaking at the event, Graham Woods, director of system engineers at ExaGrid, said the ExaGrid backup systems are designed to meet the needs of companies backing up between 1TB and 130TB of data in a single system.
He also claimed that the solution offers the fastest backups - up to 50% to 90% faster than tape, via post-process data deduplication and full servers in a GRID.
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