Highly Efficient, Reliable Network-Based Disaster Recovery

Challenges

Recent disasters have underscored the fallibility of the tape-based backup and vaulting strategies commonly used for disaster recovery. These strategies are simply inadequate because they involve too much human intervention for effective management of large of amounts of data and are prone to data loss due to human error or natural causes. In addition, Gartner estimates that one in 10 recovery images on tape is, in fact, unrecoverable.

Yet, backup-to-disk methods have not had a major impact on tape-based disaster recovery practices. This is because, due to the high cost of disk versus tape, disk serves as a mere cache - or staging site - for a tape library infrastructure. In addition, disk-based disaster recovery strategies such as replication have been too costly because of wide area network (WAN) bandwidth needed for the required volume of data.

Today, disaster recovery is still a tape-based process.

What's been missing is the technology to move backup data efficiently and economically over networks, to electronically vault the backup data to offsite storage and to meet long-term retention requirements.

Solution

• Data Domain Deduplication Storage systems
• Data Domain Replicator software option
• Existing enterprise backup software

Leveraging Data Domain's high performance deduplication and local compression technology, Global Compression™, dramatically reduces the volume of backup and archive data to be transferred. By cutting the network bandwidth requirements up to 99%, the Data Domain solution enables offsite vaulting for disaster recovery across the WAN and eliminates the need for trucks picking up backup tapes.

The solution also offers:

• Lower Cost of Operations by decreasing the amount of data sent over a WAN by 99% or more, thereby reducing time and bandwidth costs.
• Seamless Integration with Existing Infrastructure, requiring no changes to the existing network infrastructure or backup policies.
• Improved Recovery Time vs. tape. Data can be recovered locally from the on-site Data Domain system or over the network from a replica system, free of waiting for tapes to be delivered by trucks, searching the right set of tapes or mounting delays.

By replacing tape-based backup systems, Data Domain dramatically improves the speed and efficiency of disaster recovery and eliminates tape, trucks, unnecessary delays, and security risks.