The future of Windows data protection - today (page 2 of 2)

The new Centralised Admin Server Option offers a single server for true centralised management.

The advanced disk based backup option and enhanced disk staging combine to address the issue of backup overhead by removing this burden from the application server and allowing for faster recovery times and more frequent backups. The advanced disk based backup has two components: synthetic backups and off host backups. Also Backup Exec 10 has the ability to do disk-to-disk-to-tape to achieve faster backup and recovery times.

Synthetic backups help out where your backup Windows are under the greatest strain. Synthetics allow for incremental backups to be performed at any time after a single full backup. 'Synthetic' full backups can then be created from the single full backup and the incremental backups.

The benefit being that you can restore a synthetic full backup in exactly the same way you would an ordinary full backup. The other plus side is that you only ever have to take one full backup which has a huge impact where backup windows are tight.

Off host backups allow the performance impact of running a backup to be removed completely from the application by backing up a snapshot straight from disk to tape via the backup server without touching the application. Where you require fast backup and recovery of files locally, staging backups to disk means you can backup faster, and also recover files faster, but duplicating those backups to tape also allows for tapes to be sent offsite for disaster recovery purposes.

Where organisations have deployed Linux servers for certain projects there is now a high performance agent for protecting these systems.

Storage Exec™
Storage Exec can help organisations to significantly improve backup and recovery performance by reducing that amount of data to be backed up and recovered. It helps in three areas: Reporting, Quota Management and File Blocking.

Storage Exec allows you to report on your entire Windows environment to find out what data is stored where, what type of data it is and whether it is legitimate business data. Having done so, organisations can typically free up 30% of their disk space, resulting in far less data to backup and recover.

This generally means a significant reduction in backup media costs such as tape. Also, if you discover unprotected data then you can start the backup job for that data from within Storage Exec.

The quota management features can significantly slow down storage growth by limiting the amount of storage capacity users can access, thus disciplining them into keeping their storage usage more under control.

The file blocking capabilities ensure that only legitimate business data is being stored through blocking files such as mp3 files and other non business related data. This File blocking technology is also hugely beneficial in cleaning out old, stale and non business data before going through a consolidation or migration exercise.

Replication Exec™
Replication Exec provides a solution for efficiently protecting remote office data on Windows file servers or Windows NAS (Networked Attached Storage) devices without the need to have someone onsite to manage the process. It also eliminates the need to buy expensive hardware for those remote offices.

An organisation can simply push the replication client out to all the remote offices, decide what data they want to replicate and achieve continuous data protection through replicating all the data back to head quarters to be backed up locally. If the remote offices need to restore that data, it can simply be restored back over the network.

Backup Exec Suite Integration
VERITAS' new Smart Link technology ensures that all the parts of the suite are integrated.

Once you've identified data to be backed up with Storage Exec you can use Backup Exec to backup that data from within the Storage Exec console. Any replication jobs can be monitored within the Backup Exec console as well as the backup jobs started from within Storage Exec.

Summary
The Backup Exec Suite provides a powerful and integrated solution for delivering comprehensive Windows based protection.

• Continuous Data Protection - for desktops, laptops and remote office data;

• Fast Disk Based Recovery - using the very latest disk based backup technology;

• Simple to Grow, Simple to Manage - the new CASO option and the Smart Link technology ensure great scalability and simple centralised management.

To realise the benefits of the Backup Exec suite try them for yourself using VERITAS' free evaluation downloads.