Online Backup

ParaScale Online Data Backups

Despite ever improving backup technologies, many organizations still need to perform tape-based backups while some take tapes off-site to satisfy compliance and disaster recovery requirements.

The Challenge

This traditional approach has several limitations. It is a known fact that tape backup is incredibly slow, and the increasingly larger quantities of data that need to be backed up mean that the "backup window" (the time the harried IT manager has to finish his/her backup outside of peak hours) no longer nicely fits between 5pm and 8am. Conventional overnight backups directly to tape just are not common anymore.

Secondly, retrieving files from tapes is worse than writing files to tapes. IT admins joke that "it is not about the backup, it is about the restore" ... this is indeed true! Users demand files to be restored instantly; however the IT department typically does not have sufficient resources to shuffle tapes, especially offsite tapes, to respond to "lost file" requests fast enough.

The ParaScale Solution

ParaScale offers an ideal solution for backups to disk

The key to ParaScale backups is overall disk write speed. ParaScale provides massive write bandwidth by allowing multiple backups (i.e., disk writes) to proceed in parallel across multiple storage nodes. A ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) solutions with ten storage nodes provides backup rates of over 500 MBps (= 10 x 50 MBps), and dramatically shortens the time required to perform backups. After backup to a PCS-based on-disk solution, backups can be spooled to tape for archiving and off-site storage.

ParaScale enables IT organizations to maintain several months of data by managing inexpensive backups on disk. Using backup software such as NetBackup from Veritas/Symantec, users can recover files from disks as needed, thus reducing the wait-time and complexity of restoring from tape libraries.Since users notice most lost files within a few weeks, IT can give users direct access to their own recent backups for recovery without IT intervention, reducing expenses.