Ultimate business protection : backing up remote offices and mobile users

Many companies struggle to protect their data efficiently in a geographically dispersed environment, and will often inadvertently neglect remote locations while focusing on a central office. A lack of local skilled IT personnel often makes this situation worse. Backup and restore is more complex for remote locations and the end result is that critical data is left unprotected.

Centralizing backup is the obvious solution to reduce management costs and gain the advantages of consolidated backup in your central office. However, limited bandwidth between remote and central offices makes a traditional LAN-based backup an inefficient solution. You would have to extend your backup windows to enable complete data transfer over a comparably slow link.

Given all of this, the ideal solution to the remote office problem is mirroring all of your relevant data to a NAS ((Network Attached Storage) file server in your central office and utilizing intelligent software designed specifically to work over slow links. Data from multiple remote sites can be replicated over an IP network to the central NAS server, which in turn can back up all data to a direct-attached autoloader or tape drive at full speed. And because data is constantly replicated to the NAS system, you can recover it almost instantaneously in the event of a system failure or disaster.

HP StorageWorks NAS servers with HP OpenView Storage Mirror make optimal use of linked network bandwidth by copying only blocks of data that have changed at remote sites. You can configure replication to use only a percentage of the available bandwidth or to run only at off-peak times. This enables large amounts of data to be synchronized over slow links while retaining the faster connection for day-to-day business activities.

While servers are often protected very well, desktops and notebooks often are not. Users are often left to back up data on their own, which frequently means backups do not occur at all. Especially vulnerable are mobile users who spend less time connected to the network—this makes a full backup of data difficult at best. To overcome this all-too-familiar scenario, the best strategy is to synchronize data directories automatically when a user connects to the network. Since only the changed data has to be synchronized, the data transfer volume is minimal.

In this solution, data is sent to a central NAS system optimized for serving files and that can handle synchronization for hundreds of mobile users. Some NAS servers also offer snapshot technology that enables users to keep several copies of each file during the day. With Microsoft® Windows XP, they can restore files themselves without help from the IT department, which significantly reduces costs.

Once data reaches the NAS server, it can be backed up to an autoloader or tape drive connected directly to it or to the network. HP StorageWorks NAS servers are the ideal consolidation platform. They offer inexpensive disk capacity for backup staging purposes and act as the backup server at the same time. You can also integrate virus scanning to keep your backup data clean.

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