Remote Office Backup

The increasing quantity and importance of remote data (data stored outside the data center) is causing companies to re-evaluate their current remote backup processes. In a recent survey, companies reported that as much as 60 percent of their remote-backup procedures may fail on a nightly basis.

Managing remote data poses unique challenges given the variability of networks, computing platforms, lack of trained IT staff at remote locations, and other issues.  Traditional methods of managing remote data tend to be expensive, unreliable and manually intensive.

The advanced remote data management and movement technology of the AxiomONE™ File Replicator now cost-effectively solves the challenges of managing data at remote offices and sites. It provides an automated “lights-out” solution that transfers and guarantees a second copy of remote data in a central hub or data center.

Business Benefits:

Assured Remote Data Protection

Protecting remote data and managing the exchange of data between corporate locations and remote offices is neither trivial nor cheap.

IT administrators in companies with remote offices often spend significant amounts of time managing backup, data management, and data transfer requirements for those offices. Even so, critical requirements such as backups and disaster recovery may not be adequately covered.

Often, central IT staff must rely on non-technical staff in remote locations to change backup tapes, initiate processes, and take other actions they are neither trained nor compensated to perform.

As a result, companies report that as much as 60 percent of their remote backup procedures may fail on a nightly basis. This represents operational, litigation, and compliance risks that few companies can afford. Managing remote data effectively requires that you accommodate network variability, dissimilar computing platforms, security needs, data integrity, and implement process automation to overcome the lack of trained IT staff at remote locations.

AxiomONE™ File Replicator provides a proven remote data protection that eliminates these exposures and assures that remote data is protected reliably.

Operational Cost Savings

Many companies are re-evaluating their current backup processes, not only to protect critical data, but to reduce overall IT costs.

Centrally-controlled, automated processes have been shown to decrease backup costs by as much as 75 percent due to the elimination of tapes, tape drives, offsite tape storage, and redundant or inadequate staffing efforts at each location. Other costs savings are seen during any data recovery process.

It no longer takes days to find and restore tapes (assuming they are available, accessible and current). So rather than relying on individual backups and separate point processes for each remote site and the staffing required for each, a more effective enterprise approach is to allow central IT staff to control remote data management and backup. This model provides a consolidated process that moves remote data to a hub site for backup or archive.

Technical Features :

Central Policy-Based Control

To efficiently control data at remote sites, enterprises must be able to set up and implement central policies. That means setting a rule once and having that directive implemented throughout the enterprise, rather than managing activities individually at different sites with multiple separate platform-specific policies and tools.

While many products claim central control capability, they in fact require administrators to establish a unique connection to each remote node to set policy. This approach consumes hours of administration time not only during initial set up, but each time a business requirement changes. AxiomONE File Replicator provides a central "set it and forget it" approach that automates the communication of policy to the remote sites (which range from the tens to thousands), and will notify the administrator if something does not proceed according to policy.

WAN Network Bandwidth Utilization

Any solution that addresses remote data must take into account bandwidth restrictions and a range of network conditions. Remote locations frequently have varying bandwidth that needs to be shared among multiple applications and users at particular times.

For this reason, AxiomONE File Replicator delivers on these requirements with features that enable efficient use of available bandwidth such as byte-level differential data transfer to send only changed data, bandwidth scheduling and throttling, multi-streaming, and compression.

The amount of network overhead, or information that is in addition to the data being transferred, that a product sends over the network is an important consideration. Obviously, less is better than more. Finally, since some remote connections will likely be impaired during some processes, the ability to restart at the point of failure is critical along with the ability to re-route information flow to alternate network connections and paths.

Security and Data Integrity

When moving data over networks, data security is always a major concern. Networks are always susceptible to intrusion, but particularly so in remote locations where there are fewer IT controls. As a result, any remote data solution should:

• Authenticate all sending and receiving nodes prior to any data transfer
• Encrypt data during transmission
• Use a single firewall port and minimize firewall rules

The ability to ensure that data is received with 100 percent integrity is also an important consideration. One of the biggest points of failure for remote tape backups is when data is corrupted on the tape and therefore non-recoverable. With best-in-class disk-to-disk backup technologies such as the AxiomONE File Replicator, data accuracy can be 100 percent guaranteed.

Heterogeneous System Support

It is common that a company with multiple remote locations has a variety of computing platforms and applications to support varying business applications and processes. It is therefore important to choose a solution that can work within a heterogeneous environment.

While this requirement seems simplistic, many products today only operate within homogeneous (single operating system) environments. AxiomONE File Replicator delivers on this heterogeneous capability with the ability to support all Windows, Unix, and Linux systems with storage content on DAS/NAS or SAN.

Shorter Recovery Time

All the time and money spent on backup is wasted if data can't be recovered in a timely fashion. The amount of time it takes to recover from a data loss event is specified as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Some backup and replication technologies require unacceptable manual processing to re-build protected data for use. The AxiomONE File Replicator makes recovery fast and easy: it stores an exact replica of each remote file in the central storage repository, providing immediate access at the file level when it is needed.

Remote process automation and application Interfacing

To minimize or eliminate the need for manual effort at remote locations, the management solution must be able to automate processes and interface with remote applications to access data.

For example, it is preferable to back up applications such as Exchange or SQL Server using native backup routines. Therefore, the remote data solution must be able to integrate with the application and invoke the native backup package as part of the backup process.

Similarly, to maintain data and application consistency, filesystem, or disk levels for applications such as SAP and Oracle, data must be accessed through the application to ensure integrity, instead of accessing it directly at the database. Other custom or script-based processes may also be needed or required prior,during,or after data transmission. AxiomONE File Replicator provides the capability to automate these as part of the overall remote backup process.

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