RenovoData Weekly Articles

                                                     

The second part of the two-part series on “Green IT” for disaster recovery focuses on data deduplication.  In going green, deduplication provides the capabilities to address power, cooling and space consumption challenges by optimizing disk capacity and storing more data with less space.  Reducing the space utilization in a disk-to-disk backup system increases power efficiency and decreases cooling costs. 

Data Deduplication

Data deduplication compares segments of data being written to disk storage with previously stored data segments and removes all unnecessary duplicate files.  It is a data reduction technique that makes storage more efficient and dramatically reduces expenses for the entire IT infrastructure.

Key Benefits of Data Deduplication 

Save Power and Cooling Costs.   Tapes stack up over time, requiring more storage space.  Deduplication reduces the overall footprint by using less storage with the exact same amount of information.   

 

Increase Retention Capacity with Less Waste.  Deduplication’s elimination of unnecessary files allows the ability to store critical business and regulatory files for a long-term, at a fraction of the space within the datacenter.

 

Improve Disaster Recovery (DR).   There is less bandwidth needed to replicate data.   Also, if you send less, you store less on the other side; which relates to storages costs, as well as power and cooling of the DR location.

 

Lessen CO₂ Emissions.  Trucks are not required to ship bulky tapes offsite.  Therefore, there is no gasoline being used to transport disks to an offsite location.

 

An offsite data backup company with innovative deduplication and virtualization technologies allows increased IT flexibility and frees up datacenters from the shortcomings of a static, physical IT infrastructure.  Choosing a reliable and efficient remote backup service provider makes “greening” the IT organization simple and efficient.

As energy climbs the list of corporate priorities, the call for "green IT" disaster recovery services and solutions is proliferating.  Rising energy costs and consumption in datacenters are hot topics; whether the concern is saving money, deploying new IT services, keeping the datacenter running or sparing the environment.  Services and features such as server virtualization and data deduplication provided by a qualified offsite data backup company offer economic and ecological solutions that reduce energy costs from the desktop to the datacenter by streamlining a business' IT infrastructure.  This article is Part 1 of 2 which will discuss ways in which server virtualization serves as a green IT disaster recovery solution.

SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization technology allows the ability to contain and consolidate the number of servers in a datacenter.  In turn, this enables businesses to run multiple applications and operating system workloads on the same server.  Consequently, reducing the number of physical servers decreases power and cooling costs, and provides more computing power in less space.  Further, in addition to reducing costs, increasing IT capacity and decreasing the amount of space occupied in the datacenter, server virtualization helps with the environment.  Every server that is virtualized saves electricity and carbon dioxide emissions. 

Key Benefits of Server Virtualization

Reduce Consumption and Consolidate Servers.  Server virtualization eliminates server sprawl and cuts maintenance costs.  Every virtualized server saves on electricity and cuts the annual costs of energy.

Receive Energy Efficient Initiatives.  Achieve greater savings and faster ROI. Virtualization is a proven solution for increasing energy efficiency, and many utility providers offer financial incentives for virtualized desktop and server consolidation projects.

Minimize IT Carbon Footprint.  Every virtualized server eliminates 4 tons of carbon dioxide from the environment, which is equivalent to removing 1.5 cars off the road.

Increase IT Capacity. Improve server utilization and free up both power and space by running fewer highly utilized servers.

When choosing a remote backup company with comprehensive disaster recovery solutions, server virtualization often tops the list because it right-sizes the largest culprit of energy over-consumption - underutilized desktops and servers.  In standard IT environments, these machines sit idle most of the time, consuming significant amounts of power.  An offsite data backup company which hosts server virtualization for disaster recovery safely consolidates these machines into much less hardware.  Overall, virtualization for disaster recovery provides tremendous energy benefits and a lifeline to data centers that are running low on capacity and high on power and cooling costs.  Choosing a remote backup service provider that provides virtualization for disaster recovery will allow an organization to create cost and energy efficient IT environments which significantly supports the green movement.

Hurricane season is here.  As the Department of Homeland Security prepares a status report around disaster recovery preparedness in the wake of a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane, backing up data is an urgent mission for all companies – especially small to medium-sized businesses.  In addition to advanced online backup, a remote backup company provides data storage, data protection and disaster recovery solutions.

In times of a catastrophic event, like hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the primary areas of concern will naturally revolve around personal safety, while data critical to business operations are secondary - at best.  Business owners and employees flee with their loved ones, while critical business records and data backup media such as tapes are left behind.  This reason alone calls for a need of a disaster recovery plan that includes automated offsite data backup and protection.

Offsite backup is essential as hurricane season emerges – especially in hurricane-prone states such as Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas.  A remote backup company that uses agentless technology is advantageous over conventional backup technologies.  With an agentless architecture, backup and restoration activities will flawlessly be performed once the backup software is installed on the host machine at an office location.  The data is virtually transmitted to an offsite data vault where restorations can take place at the file level, or can be used to perform a bare metal restore to a different machine or location if needed.  When researching offsite data backup providers, make sure they offer automated and unattended backup for all data files, including emails and databases held on PCs, file servers and application/database servers.

An additional benefit of using a remote backup company to secure essential business data during the hurricane season is the first-class data compression employed.  Data compression technologies, along with deduplication, reduce bandwidth and storage requirements.  Also, all data is AES-encrypted at the client site before transmission, then stored in an encrypted format at a secure offsite data vault.  Data is restored either locally or from a centralized site, as a complete volume, individual files or complete bare metal restore of the server.  Multi-site companies can use this solution to consolidate all backup and recovery processes.

A remote backup service provider is an ideal method of ensuring disaster recovery in the event of a natural cataclysmic event.  The consolidation of the backup process offered by a remote backup company offers a secure advantage over other data backup methods.  Data backups are compressed, encrypted and replicated to a central site and are stored in a secure, enterprise-class offsite data vault in encrypted form.