Ultimate business protection : LAN-based backup solutions

A LAN-based backup solution best fits a business or department that runs continual business processes and has several servers and workstations connected to a LAN that need to be backed up. If your business has some or all of these characteristics you may benefit from a LAN solution:

• Operates a continuous, business-critical operation
• Has unpredictable data growth
• Requires hourly or daily backup
• Has more than 5 networked servers
• Supports multiple operating systems
• Has a legacy infrastructure
• Has already deployed a backup system
• Is looking for a scalable, cost-effective solution
• Needs to automate the backup process
• Is focused on storage capacity, performance, reliability, durability, and availability

In a LAN-based backup scenario, the backup management server can be connected to either the main LAN or a dedicated backup LAN. A dedicated backup LAN is recommended in situations where performance degradation in the main LAN because of backup volume is not acceptable. On a dedicated backup LAN, disk agents placed on servers and workstations push data over the LAN to the backup server, which then writes the data to tape.

A LAN-based backup solution is perfect if you want to automate your backup process and schedule backups on certain servers at certain times without manual intervention. For a smaller network, you could use an autoloader containing a single tape drive. On a larger network with a greater capacity requirement, you might choose a tape library. Compared with standalone tape drives, these LAN-connected drives bring significant resource savings and reliability improvements to the backup process.

Capacity and performance planning are the keys to selecting the appropriate LAN-based backup device. The first step is to calculate the daily backup volume for each server and workstation. When you consider performance, keep in mind that a dedicated gigabit backup LAN will transfer data at about 80 MB/second as long as the media server has sufficient processing power to support the transfer.

• A LAN-based data protection solution is limited to a maximum, practical data rate of 288 GB/hr.
• A dedicated backup LAN will give you the best overall performance and have the least impact on your main LAN.
• If you require a higher capacity and/or faster backup, a tape library with multiple drives may be the best solution.

How-to guides