Building a better data protection strategy means software and people

Being well prepared for contingencies, that could happen at any time makes sound business sense. But why is it, that backup, disaster recovery, and high availability are invariably treated as three separate problems, each requiring a different set of solutions from numerous sources and vendors? Especially when you already have the foundation in position for a sound business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

Approaching each of these issues individually does not solve the larger business problem, which is the requirement for continuous operations, 24x7. Building on your existing strategy is easier than you would think. With scalable options, such as the virtualisation platform, adding to your protection infrastructure is much more manageable than it was a few years ago.

Building a business continuity infrastructure includes the three elements of data protection, high availability and disaster recovery. Each element is an extension of the previous one - but each is as important as the next.

Without adequate backing up of corporate data, there is no way to recover from disaster and get the business up and running again. Building on the data protection solution companies can build their solution and scale the explosion of data and the necessity to operate 24x7.

Although backup has been around for a long time - fundamentally it has not changed much. However, everything else about the way a business operates has changed. Information is not just text-based, but increasingly includes voice, image, and video components as well. File sizes are much larger. More data is being kept online. And with the advent of the Internet and global networks, most data centres must operate 24x7. So a solution that was acceptable 5 years ago just doesn't work any more, and certainly will not work in the future. So how are companies dealing with the problem?

VERITAS is the number one vendor of data protection, high availability and disaster recovery software for UNIX, Windows, and Linux operating systems, and is continually improving and expanding support for many other operating system platforms. VERITAS also offers cross-platform support required by the trend toward heterogeneous platforms and server consolidation.

With more efficient network backup solutions, creating higher bandwidth together with application solutions that only backup altered data, this means you do not have to take the application offline for routine storage management tasks, like backup.

VERITAS offers organisations the industry's most comprehensive, hardware-neutral solutions for data protection and accessibility. Applications are best managed and protected with solutions that understand the complex structure for storing and retrieving data.
VERITAS has teamed up with leading enterprise application vendors like Oracle, Sybase, Informix, HP, IBM and Microsoft to integrate VERITAS solutions with their applications.

Our solutions actually capitalise on your application's inherent design to bring you database-aware solutions backed by the vendors themselves.

VERITAS Software's built-in and add-on solutions for environments are powerful, seamless, and vendor certified. VERITAS solutions deliver complete data integrity and manageability, and lower costs, in the UNIX, Linux, AIX, Windows 2000 and NT environments.

Since every enterprise has a unique business process, the backup and disaster recovery tools must be flexible enough to adapt to your business model. It does not matter what systems you are currently running, VERITAS is able to meet your growing requirements.

Whether you simply need backup software or the mirroring or replication of data to hard disk, clustering and global data management, VERITAS Software's solutions keep businesses of all sizes up and running, providing the optimum performance, high availability, and data protection essential for all data servers.

VERITAS' availability and protection solutions grow with you. Whether organically or by acquisition, VERITAS software can scale solutions for all major environments, applications, databases, or messaging systems
VERITAS is bringing data protection and storage management to the environment for the most demanding customers. It's not just the data at corporate headquarters that is crucial to keeping the business running.

Local offices, where there are often no IT trained staff available, also need to backup data and restore files. Centralised management (with Global Data Manager) and control of the backup process is an important consideration, because having fully trained IT personnel at every remote location is cost-prohibitive. Trained IT staff are then only required at corporate offices. The administration of both backup and recovery can take place remotely while managing and implementing corporate disaster recovery, high availability and data protection strategies from a central location.

And, therefore, a worldwide corporate data protection plan can now be realised by mirroring or replicating data changes to a central corporate backup library.
In the vast majority of instances the need for data recovery are caused not by disasters, but by simple everyday problems. The unintentional deletion of a file, data corruption, or the failure of a disk drive are far more likely to need data to be restored than some cataclysmic event.

To ensure that organisations are able to recover data quickly they need backup 24x7 with local and worldwide solutions. VERITAS' solutions are designed to integrate into an organisation's infrastructure to build a total data protection solution from one vendor.

This means that the costs associated with building a total multi backup solution are minimised as managers can choose which information is most critical and under what circumstances a full recovery is required. The most critical data can be stored for immediate access, while less critical data can be migrated to tape. Because your data is your business' most essential tool, your IT managers must meet demands for the availability of vastly increased data in less time, and with dwindling resources. VERITAS addresses this challenge with data management solutions tailored to meet the needs of the most demanding environments.

Let's face it; businesses today require a high level of protection:

• Continuous backup - Volume Replicator, Volume Manager

• Incremental change-only backup - Backup Exec, NetBackup, NetBackup Pro

• Data migration for the management of increasing levels of data - Storage Migrator

• Fast retrieval of required data - File System & FlashSnap

• Controllable networking costs that provide scalable options - Volume Manager, File System, Foundation Suite, Database Editions

• Central data management - Global Data manager

• Storage vaulting support for efficient point-in-time restoration - Netbackup 4.5

• Online replication of most recent and most active data - Volume Replicator

VERITAS has always taken the lead in data protection, building technologies to deal with the paradigm shift in business models over the last few years. VERITAS products not only provide revolutionary advances in data protection, but also simultaneously support high availability and disaster recovery strategies. Our solutions are the business norm for the business models of today and the future.