Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2014
Like insurance, data backup is a necessary evil. You don't think you need it until something goes wrong, and then you realise just how crucial it was in the first place. If you don't have it during the critical moment when it is required, it can cost you dearly in irreplaceable data, lost revenue and productivity.
So says says Simon Campbell-Young, CEO of Phoenix Distribution, the leading broad-based distributor of software and hardware - including several backup solutions - on the African continent. "The premise of backup is simple. The most important files and data in your organisation need to be duplicated and stored in such a way and in a safe, secure place from where it can be easily recovered."
Yet, despite the straight-forward process, IT research and advisory firm Gartner has found that many companies' backup systems still leave a lot to be desired. In an article titled: "The Broken State of Backup", the firm reports that backup success rates today are only between 75% and 85%, with only three quarters of backup recoveries in some sectors being successful. The rest were only able to recover some - if any - of their data, despite having a backup method in place.
"Data is increasing at an alarming pace. Last year there was already a reported 4.4 trillion gigabytes in the world, and by 2020, the American research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) expects that number to have grown to a staggering 44 trillion gigabytes," Campbell-Young says. "Back in 2011, consultancy group McKinsey & Company had already conducted a survey which found that companies with more than 1 000 employees store, on average, more than 235 terabytes of data - and since that survey is already three years old, that number is bound to have increased significantly by now - which is more data than is contained at the US Library of Congress. With that much data floating around, the storage needs of even small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are bound to grow."
Trying to keep up with this overwhelming, constant influx of data, and finding and investing in the latest backup and recovery technologies for them, can be a challenge, especially for SMEs with more modest budgets, Campbell-Young says. "That is why network attached storage (NAS) is a good option for smaller businesses and why it has gained popularity in the SME space. A NAS device typically consists of a specially designed computer - actually more like a first-level data storage server - without a display or keyboard, and it contains one or more hard drives which runs on an operating system designed specifically for the management and administration of those files. It is a great solution for any business or home user that has multiple computers on one network."
While some NAS servers simply act as a way to backup and share files across your network, others - such as the Buffalo LinkStation and TeraStation NAS units distributed in South Africa by Phoenix Distribution - have additional functionality such as the ability to stream media and share a printer among networked devices.
"Buffalo's LinkStation NAS is ideal for a home and small office, while the TeraStation line of network storage devices, which represents Buffalo's NAS and iSCSI - an acronym for Internet Small Computer System Interface - unified storage solutions are more suitable for professional and business-class. iSCSI is an IP-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities," Campbell-Brown explains. "TeraStation contains high availability storage technologies like RAID, hot-spare and real-time replication, offering reliability and high performance."