Backup Solutions

Tape is Dead!  
Well not quite, but the evolution has begun and its extinction is near. This may sound a bit brash on the surface however there is some truth to both statements.  Businesses today, especially regulated industries and e-businesses must focus on business continuity, which is basically a plan for disaster recovery. By utilizing the benefits of disk-to-disk storage there is a better disaster recovery and backup storage solution.  What is wrong with the good ole tape backup solutions? What is disk-to-disk backup storage and why is it better?

First of all, any IT manager that has attempted disaster recovery by performing a full restore, complete with incremental tapes, knows that the restore process required for tapes is complex, time-consuming and down right frustrating. With downtime being the chief enemy of every business, disk-to-disk (hard drive) based backups are becoming more popular. Especially to companies that can't deal with large amount of downtime and must have a short RTO (Recovery Time Objective) during the business day. A Fibre Channel Industry Association study determines that the average cost per hour of downtime at a typical financial institution's brokerage house can be in excess of $6.5 million. Note that this does not take into account the bad publicity and the possible irreversible impact on a company's reputation.

Most tape backup storage solutions depend upon multiplexing or interleaving to stream data from multiple systems simultaneously to one tape thus speeding up the backup window.  Unfortunately multiplexing takes much longer to restore leaving IT managers with headaches. Disk-to-disk is not only cheaper than using tape, it provides quick access, RAID protection and high-speed data transfer since disk does not require multiplexing. Disk-to-disk backups, such as the "Backup Monster" or the "TeraBuster" can be mounted on demand and make the arduous task of restoring quick and painless. An IT manager can use a striped disk array storage system with an unlimited number of devices to back up to and none of them would require multiplexing.

Once the previous night's backups are sent to disk, they can be removed and stored elsewhere or for further security they can even be easily copied to tape and sent off-site. These subsequent tapes would also not need to be multiplexed, because the copy is being made locally. Hard drives are so inexpensive that cyclical, full and incremental backups can be keep on disk. Using this plan, day-to-day restores would be fulfilled instantaneously by disk. Tape would now only be kept off site and used for disaster recovery and archival restores.

In conclusion it turns out that tape is probably not dead, but the state of backup storage and data protection has evolved. Gone are the endless days of tortuous tape backups and restores. Tape now compliments disk-to-disk backups and provides an added aspect to data protection.

Aberdeen is at the forefront of this evolution by designing the Stirling line of all-inclusive backup storage backup servers. First we created the 3U rackmount "Backup Monster" with 2 terabytes of backup storage capacity for under $5000.  Based on our customers demands, we have pushed the proverbial envelope to offer an unparalleled 4 terabytes of SATA storage space for under $12,000, with the 4U rackmount "TeraBuster."  As with the "Backup Monster," the "TeraBuster" can integrate Dantz Development's Retrospect™ backup software and can be configured with either single dual Intel® Xeon™ processors for those that require the most computing power possible. As with all Aberdeen rack mounted servers, the "Backup Monster" and the "TeraBuster" both come standard with an industry leading 5-Year Warranty.