RenovoData Weekly Articles

Today’s recessed economy has prompted many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to look into data deduplication as a cost-effective way to transition into disk-based data backup.  Data deduplication reduces storage requirements by eliminating redundant data and is applicable to most businesses throughout various industries.   With data deduplication, storage devices only store changes to data.  

Dissatisfaction with the manageability of tape-based backup is a major reason SMBs choose data deduplication technology.  Larger organizations often have a bigger budget with more established processes and higher product availability.  Tape backup is resource – intensive, considering people, time and money.  Additionally, tape is unreliable with slow restoration and high security risks.   So for SMBs looking to adequately protect their mission-critical data with faster recoverability, disk backup has proven to provide stronger benefits.

Historically, disk storage has been a relatively expensive option for SMBs when compared to tape.  However, although the cost of disk capacity has dropped considerably in recent years, tape is still a cheaper option initially.  Conversely, data deduplication allows SMBs to gain more storage capacity out of fewer hard drives which helps make the switch from tape to disk more economically attractive.

Employ a remote backup company which leverages data deduplication technology.  In addition to increased security through industry-grade data encryption, faster restores and greater reliability, SMBs experience increased operational savings as well as productivity gains.  Disk-to-disk backup with data deduplication provides the ability to instantaneously verify that data has been backed up while reducing costs and space utilization.

When searching the market for an offsite data backup and disaster recovery solution, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the multitude of options and all the technical jargon within the remote backup service provider industry.  One such term is “agentless” backup.  Agentless backup is a backup and restore process that eliminates the need for individual software installations, or agents, to be installed on target servers requiring protection.  Agent-based solutions are usually more costly because in most cases the software is proprietary to the service provider and needs to be installed on every computer in the network to be backed up. 

In a situation where an entire site has data loss resulting from a disaster, the physical hardware would need to be replaced and all essential software components have to be installed to restore business continuity.  Then, after worrying about the operating system and applications, it would be necessary to install an agent prior to restoring the data backed up in the service provider’s vault.  This not only drains human resources and time, but also has the potential to be a huge financial burden for a company;  which is counterproductive in these tough economic times.

As an alternative, agentless backup uses communication protocols to manage tasks from a single administrator computer for an unlimited number of machines connected on a local or remote network and doesn’t require the management of agent software.  In general, the agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralized management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions.  Backup from an agentless architecture can be performed from a single point of administration, which results in lower costs.   Additionally, since agentless backup is priced according to the total storage used, there are no licensing fees.  Businesses reduce backup costs overall by employing disk-to-disk agentless backup.

It’s best to use a remote data backup service company that can also provide disaster recovery consulting in the case of a complete site loss.  Choose a remote data backup service provider that employs a high-end, agentless solution and does not require the use of an agent for every computer in the network for backup and recovery.  Taking this route will keep costs at a minimum because only one backup appliance at each site would need to have the software installed, and there is no need to perform a bare metal restore on the backup machine.

For more information on the agentless architecture, download our Agentless Backup and Recovery white paper.

Fact:   According to the 7^th Annual  ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, The average company spends between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in total ramifications per year for desktop-oriented disasters (both hard and soft costs).