No Backup? Out of Business!
Enterprise data backup strategy is a critical issue for any business. Companies are literally forced to employ an enterprise backup policy by legislation, especially if their competence reaches beyond government or medical spheres. It is small to none surprise then that there is a slew of companies in the backup industry hunting for small to mid-size businesses to sell them enterprise backup systems.
Setting out on a search for a solid enterprise data backup system inexperienced decision makers will face an overwhelming and ongoing flood of information. NAS-based services, distributed backup, dedupe methods, ROI and optimal backup windows, etc. - all this can confuse even an ultimately decisive person. This is why this responsibility in enterprise environment is usually delegated to a separate backup administration team or there is at least a corporate backup administrator.
Companies must take into account many things to maintain continuous 24x7 data protection and set up the best possible enterprise backup method. The most trendy catch phrases in the enterprise backup systems field recently have been "deduplication" and "backup distribution". You are likely to hear more of them as the backup industry develops, so it might be a good idea to get acquainted with these technologies beforehand.
Deduplication presupposes economy of disk space capacities by businesses as duplicate data is erased, or rather dealt in a particular way that allows other data to be written to the same spot. There're slight changes in the dedupe methods applied by different enterprise backup systems providers so that they can patent them but in its essence deduplication (or dedupe for short) is all about optimizing the space for backups.
Deduplication presupposes that the backup system assigns individual hash values to backed up data and keeps a catalog of all hashes that allows for quick data comparison. There are backup systems that provide ongoing deduplication right in the middle of backing up process or post backup deduplication. Some dedupe systems can also check the data identity by going down to the byte level to eliminate all possibilities of similar hash values and, consequently, data loss.
Data distribution is the next most talked about backup topic, and it concerns off-load of the backup server or servers. Enterprise data backup can rarely do without at least several backup servers. It is of outmost importance first of all to lower load for these servers, and second of all to make sure data is backed up all across the network with several nerds. This will provide secure data protection and blitz quick data restore.
Even if your enterprise backup methods miss deduplication or distribution techniques, which is a rare case nowadays, you may consider yourself on the safe side. Businesses that have neglected considering and employing a solid backup policy altogether are out of business by now or will be soon. Just google for pitiful Magnolia, JournalSpace, or geek.com, to name just a few.
