“Big” things tend to come in threes, whether it’s the leading car makers, ice cream flavors, TV networks or, in this instance, data protection challenges. Specifically, I’m talking about backups, restores and retention.
For IT professionals, if this Big Three is covered, you have a solid foundation for achieving a much-appreciated triple play: a good night’s sleep, peace of mind and secure job status. One of the best ways to meet this challenge is with the capabilities now possible using hardware compression with virtual tape. Foremost, this capability doubles your usable virtual tape capacity without compromising performance, allowing even better data retention and cost per TB than was possible in the past.
As there’s always the most credence given to real-world examples, let me offer proof positive from one of our customers, the Reagan family of companies. While data protection is as important to this quintet of companies in the power industry as it should be to yours or any other, they were put to the ultimate test of this lifetime; Hurricane Katrina.
While the Reagan companies survived Katrina in much better shape than most thanks in part to an established backup regime, nevertheless the hurricane represented a supreme call to action for further fortification on the data protection front. And this is a call that everyone should heed. Think about your current data protection standards. Has the time required to complete a full backup grown over the past year? Are you able to quickly—and don’t forget, painlessly—restore any data requested? Do you still have a sufficient space for retention of your business-critical data? Unless you’re batting three-for-three here, your best interests are served by re-evaluating your present performance and how it stacks up against with a suitable Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Recognizing if there is a next time they may not be as fortunate, Regan chose Overland’s new REO 4500c VTL with hardware compression to bulk up its corporate data protection plan.
Now as far as the Big Three of Data Protection is concerned, it’s locked down. They have tripled the speed of D2D backups, can restore data in minutes not hours and retain more than 12 weeks of data on disk for one of its fastest growing locations. One of the capabilities they like best is the multi-streaming VTL permits simultaneous backup and recovery scenarios. And of course, good night’s sleep is always appreciated.
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Jeffrey Graham
Senior Product Manager