What are Data Center Backup Solutions?
Data center backup and recovery software is designed to provide business continuity and prevent critical data loss, even while data centers grow more complex. While backup solutions provide a disaster recovery solution, they may also be used for workload migration. Additionally, some data center backup solutions are designed to meet data archiving and storage needs in compliance-governed industries. Modern software-defined data center backup solutions provide replication and backup of data in a vendor and hardware agnostic fashion.
Small businesses may rely on backup solutions that come with the server operating system, or built-in server backup. However, this approach creates vulnerabilities due to a lack of transparency. It also means the company may have multiple non-integrated data protection solutions. This is not viable for larger enterprises where transparency and policy-based governance rules exist. And for virtualization heavy environments, virtualization-aware data backup solutions are key.
The modern data center needs data backup solutions that cover:
• Physical and virtual servers
• Databases
• Enterprise applications (i.e., SaaS products)
• Mobile endpoints
• Public infrastructure platforms (like AWS)
Most modern data center backup solutions will optionally back data up to the cloud. However, many backup solutions provide target storage options. This includes on-premises options like a NAS appliance or tape drive for long-term storage. Many data center backup solutions are “agentless”—meaning they have no process running in the background on every machine. Yet still, data is backed up automatically according to administrator-defined rules and schedule.
Data Center Backup Features & Capabilities
Data center backup and recovery solutions provide the following feature sets:
• Combine backup & replication, recovery, and storage in a single service
• Machine / platform agnostic backup restorations
• Centralized web-based management console
• Deduplication, changed block only backup, low bandwidth consumption
• File archival, long-term storage optimized backup
• Near continuous data protection (e.g., high interval) & restore availability
• Support for remote offices, remote employees (e.g., laptops, VDI)
• Test and validation of recovery plans, recovery assurance
• Verification of backups, ransomware / virus detection
• Encryption and deduplication of transmitted data
• Protection & restore of running applications, open files, etc.
• Cloud-to-cloud backup for SaaS services (e.g., Exchange, Microsoft Office 365)
• Image-level virtual machine (VM) backup
• Multiple data restore locations (e.g., tape appliance, cloud)
• Copy data management with search & analytics
• Optional unlimited cloud storage for backups, managed cloud-based storage
• Integrated deduplication and file compression
• Regular snapshots to ensure Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is met
• Replacement appliances in case of total disaster
.
