Many companies are starting to look beyond simple tape backups to a more comprehensive archival storage solution that provides faster access with simplified scalability to overcome the challenges of backup. The traditional tape backup methodology has several limitations. Tape backup can be incredibly slow and when combined with increasingly larger quantities of data, the "backup window" no longer nicely fits between 5pm and 8am.

It is also important to consider restore objectives and requirements. Legal compliance rules for document archiving or demand from users can require that files be restored instantly or within a very limited window. In such cases the IT department typically does not have sufficient resources to shuffle tapes from the backup storage system, especially offsite tapes, to respond to "lost file" requests fast enough.

ParaScale offers an ideal solution for archiving near-line storage or disk backup by providing massive write bandwidth in parallel across multiple storage nodes. The ParaScale cloud storage software is designed to support standard enterprise protocols such as NFS, HTTP, WebDav and FTP that are widely deployed. Backup and archival storage solutions have leveraged these protocols for a very long time so adapting existing technologies, processes and workflows is easy and seamless. A common strategy is to change backup targets from existing NAS to ParaScale cloud deployments, thereby using the cloud for backup staging. The result is better performance, economics and manageability for mission critical data protection without sacrificing business continuity and disaster recovery objectives. After writing the data to a ParaScale private cloud, backups can be spooled to tape for long-term archiving and off-site storage.

In a large datacenter multiple media servers have the potential to backup in parallel into a ParaScale private cloud, with vastly greater parallel ingestion speeds versus even a beefy NAS appliance. Reading from the cloud is via tens or hundreds of nodes all at GigE speed so recovery times can be extremely fast. A common strategy is to work with the backup vendor to tune file sizes to match cloud defaults and add metadata information for management. When the time comes to retire older cloud hardware, it can be removed without downtime and newer user selected commodity hardware added to the storage cloud thereby preserving access and enabling 50 year archives. By using a ParaScale cloud users can build a scalable archival storage solution without being tied down to any specific storage vendor.

The ParaScale cloud enables IT organizations to maintain several months of data by managing inexpensive backups on disk. Users can recover files from the cloud as needed, reducing the wait-time and complexity of restoring from tape libraries. Since users typically request lost files within a few weeks, Administrators can give users direct access to their own backup storage for recovery without intervention, reducing expenses. Thus ParaScale can be deployed as a cost effective backup storage solution.

Other Resources to Consider