Today`s e-businesses highly value round-the-clock (24x7) application and information availability. The consequences for not maintaining this high level of availability can be serious. Financial houses, for example, can lose millions in revenue in less than 15 minutes of downtime.
Losing data - or not having immediate access to it - significantly impacts on e-businesses` profitability and could even threaten their survival.
Effective backup and restore software is the key to minimising downtime. Traditionally network managers have relied on a "close of business" window to perform backups. However the new stresses of e-business have all but eliminated this window, while increasing the amount of data to be replicated many fold.
In addition to this challenge, many e-businesses are facing budget constraints and are being asked to do the impossible - cut backup and restore admin costs while accommodating the rapidly growing complexities of e-business enterprise architectures.
Moreover, the very serious implications of lost data mean that increased emphasis needs to be placed on the corrective process to ensure that, in the event of a disaster, the business can be up and running again in the shortest possible time.
Added to this, administrators need to monitor virtually constant backup and restore procedures in heterogeneous environments comprising various storage subsystems, multiple operating platforms and diverse mission-critical applications.
They also need to be able to adapt their solutions to various storage architectures, including storage area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS) and direct-attached storage (DAS).
Aberdeen Group report
In a recent report the Aberdeen Group profiled the Brightstor Enterprise Backup solution from Computer Associates (CA). The report referred to Brightstor as "particularly effective" in applications where organisations wish to upgrade their present backup solutions to a "comprehensive solution that can minimise administration costs".
According to Aberdeen, backup and restore applications from many of the industry`s big guns are "topping out" due to an inability to backup or restore the large quantities of data involved with today`s e-businesses.
"Brightstor is therefore especially timely and deserves careful scrutiny," says the Aberdeen report.
Key criteria
Aberdeen research shows that the following characteristics of backup and restore software are especially useful in today`s e-business arena:
Performance: The ability to perform fast backup and recovery with full integrity on large-scale mission-critical applications and databases via "hot" online backup of applications data across the enterprise with a low impact on applications performance or systems resources (such as CPU utilisation).
Scalability: The ability to deploy a solution that protects data on multiple operating systems, leverages large servers to deliver the performance required, and supports large storage systems that have become the hallmark of storage consolidation.
Cost-effective manageability via a single point of administrative control with consistency across applications and platforms.
Comprehensive flexibility via a backup/restore architecture that supports all major platforms, databases and storage technologies, as well as fundamental enterprise storage management functions such as data migration, disaster recovery and media management.
Architecture is strength
According to the Aberdeen Group, the primary strength of CA`s Brightstor Enterprise Backup is its architecture. It groups the servers and storage to be backed up into domains, each serviced by its own server and managed by a single console. Moreover, platforms such as Unix and Windows can be mixed and matched within the domains.
Turning to the performance functionality of Brightstor, Aberdeen says that it offers specific, additional high performance backup/restore features for particular user environments and applications. For example, it allows backup to disk (near online storage) for faster recovery and "point-in-time" and snapshot copying for rapid recovery of "fresher" data.
It also offers serverless backup for Oracle and file system environments as well as data movement through EMC FasTrax data mover.
Aberdeen highlights Brightstor`s wide range of scalability functions, enabling users to deploy a solution that extends the backup and recovery capabilities beyond Windows and Unix to virtually every platform and every applications in the data centre.
In addition, Brightstor`s manageability strengths are visualised through its centralised management console based on a Web-browser-styled interface and cross platform and domain management capabilities.
For media management Brightstor includes tape-vault management, "media spanning" that supports job spanning multiple media, media pooling to allow management of and backup to a related set of devices and "media tracking" (via bar codes) to allow the export of media to off-site locations.
Modular is in
The Aberdeen report highlights the modular features of Brightstor and its ability to incrementally add the capacity, capability and performance to legacy systems over time. Brightstor is also optomised to perform backups over a SAN.
In its conclusion, the report says that as effective backup/restore becomes ever more critical to system scalability, robustness and cost-effectiveness, corporate buyers should take time to evaluate their e-business backup/restore capabilities carefully. Aberdeen research suggests that companies should begin this process by investigating and testing Brightstor Enterprise Backup.
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