Online backup more than viable for SA businesses
Issued by: Network Times
Advances in compression technologies coupled with
the drop in the price of disk means that automated,
online backups are well within reach of South African
businesses, says Ian van Reenen, director technology
of Attix5.
Ian van Reenen
Ask people about online backup and many will remember
the boom in Internet storage which reached its height
at the peak of the dotcom era.
Many companies gave away free online storage in return
for advertising. None of those companies have survived.
But the principle of backing up via the Internet is
well established and is a viable option for anyone
who wants to automate their backups in a secure, reliable
and cost-effective manner.
The main driver behind the global uptake of online
backup has been a steady reduction in the price of
disk space while early reliability issues have been
resolved.
Disk is now cheaper, more efficient and more reliable
than tape.
Traditionally tape media has been used for both backing
up and for long term archiving, but as disk failure
rates drop below that of tape, a natural segmentation
has occurred: disk is moving more and more into backup,
while tape is used for long term storage. Backups
on disk are instantly available and can be continuously
checked for reliability thanks to their random access
nature, unlike tape which can only be accessed sequentially.
For example, Attix5 uses a Dell PowerEdge 4400 rack-mounted
server system to store over 5 terabytes of data for
our clients. The disk subsystem has not experienced
a single failure since it was installed. Our clients
get the speed of their data stored on disk with the
reliability they need, plus the additional redundancy
we provide.
However, it is impractical to perform the initial
backup online. Most companies have many gigabytes
of data that need to be backed up. The solution requires
the installation of a small agent onto a client's
data server. Using the agent interface, the administrator
can select the files which need to be protected and
stipulate when the backups should take place.
Once complete the backup machine is physically transported
to the remote data centre and uploaded to the Attix5
FileServer. From then on the agent uses proprietary
technology to mirror only changes to the remote data
centre, effectively reducing the data transferred
by as much as 99,9%.
Single or multiple file recovery can instantly be
performed online while bulk data restoration can be
accelerated. This model is very efficient since 99%
of recoveries are single or small groups of files
- easily selectable and restored from disk, but painful
when restoring from tape. For example, a recent recovery
of a 15 GB exchange server was completed in 30 minutes
at one of SA's leading insurance companies. This is
less than a quarter of the time it took them with
previous tape technology.
Bandwidth is undoubtedly the limiting factor for
online backup solutions in South Africa. But since
only changes to the initial backup are transferred,
connection times and traffic are kept to a minimum.
For the larger corporate client where the daily incremental
changes are large, dedicated high-speed lines can
be put in between the service provider and the client.
At the other end of the spectrum, SMEs and home businesses
can also benefit from online backup solutions. Scheduled
backups per machine are now available for a small
monthly fee through partnerships with ISPs, regardless
of how many backups are performed.
