HP Makes Remote Office Backup Simple and Efficient

fact sheet Vendor: Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) Vendor's Information: About HP Data Protection Solutions with Deduplication About Hewlett-Packard vendor resources Prepare for the Changing Data Backup Landscape The backup and restoration of data is an essential part of any organizationa??s data storage strategy, but the way in which backups are kept and data is restored continues to change dramatically. Download this Internet.com eBook to see how advances like continuous data protection (CDP), dedeuplication and cloud computing are changing the backup and recovery landscape and see how your organization can benefit. HP StoreOnce Deduplication Software: Technology Fueling the Next Phase of Storage Optimization ESG examines trends influencing the adoption of deduplication and the limitations of existing solutions and details how HP is best positioned to deliver highly efficient deduplication solutions based on its new HP StoreOnce technology. HP StoreOnce: Reinventing Deduplication Learn how HP's StoreOnce, a new generation of deduplication software, is changing the game. Read about the new D2D solutions with HP StoreOnce and the vision for the future where HP StoreOnce enables unprecedented performance, simplicity, and efficiency while maintaining business continuity. IDC Report: Business Continuity Solutions from HP and VMware The need to ensure business continuity (BC) for IT services is a requirement, not only for large enterprises, but for all sized businesses. IDC discusses the key element of an optimal BC solution and explores the unique features and functions from VMware and HP, that when combined, can ensure compatibility as well as optimization. Standalone Data Reduction Technologies—A Storage Paradigm—Surviving the Data Explosion Using Data Reduction Techniques Data reduction technologies provide reliable and highly scalable storage solutions-with proven management and ease of use that enables higher capacity utilization with less budget, time and energy. Learn about these technologies and how HP solutions can improve storage capacity utilization. Comprehensive Data Protection SMBs invariably lack both the budget and staff to provide their companies with the same level of data protection available to larger competitors. This paper looks at the problems confronting IT managers in the SMB segment, describes a number of data protection technologies, and suggests data protection strategies that are particularly suited to SMBs.

Thanks to regulations instituted over the past decade regarding data protection and the need to retain information for legal purposes, the need for corporations to protect data at remote locations went from a headache to a potential legal disaster.

Remote office and branch office (ROBO) locations are traditionally held back by a lack of qualified IT staff to handle data backup and recovery. For corporate IT operations, ROBO backup and recovery has been an expensive and time-consuming proposition.

Tech Brief: Challenges When Broadly Deploying Data Deduplication Solutions Today, IT managers may be as concerned with backing up remote branches, small satellite offices or multiple data centers as they are with the primary data center. Despite significant advances in backup technology, such as backup to disk and data deduplication, numerous challenges remain. This tech brief examines those challenges and reviews the current solutions.

While it may be appropriate for smaller sites that have only a single server, using physical tape to handle backup and recovery at ROBO sites with multiple servers can suffer from both of these conditions. The changing and removal of tapes, for example, is often left to untrained office staff. Service providers need to be paid to transport the tapes, which then run the risk of being lost.

Physical tape at remote and branch office sites can present technical challenges as well. If the backup is large and slow, it can extend into business hours and potentially affect critical business applications.

Given the need to satisfy auditors, save money, and complete backups without negatively impacting day-to-day operations, storage vendors like HP are working to make the issues of daily backup to tape in ROBO environments a thing of the past.

Physical tape can be replaced by WAN-based backup or virtual tape libraries, creating a process that lets corporation automate and consolidate backup, even controlling the process from a regional or corporate data center.

At HP there's a vision for ROBO data protection that calls for backup data to be accessible wherever it's needed, which might include multiple offices, regional data centers, and a main corporate data center. When a single backup application is used for this process, qualified personnel can recover data from multiple locations, saving both time and money.

HP uses different technologies, including its HP Data Protector software, HP D2D (disk-to-disk) appliances, and HP VLS (virtual library system) appliances, to meet the different backup demands of ROBOs and corporate data centers.

HP's D2D technology is designed for simple, low-cost deployment in a small and mid-range IT environments, which makes it a perfect fit for ROBO locations. It's intended to be used at many sites as part of a backup and recovery strategy that is more efficient in terms of time and budget.

It is because of two technologies that it's even possible to replace tape with disk at remote and branch offices: data deduplication and low-bandwidth replication.

Most HP customers are seeing data growth of 50 percent to 60 percent each year, said Mike Ewell, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager at HP, which means there's far too much data to be transported over a WAN.

Data deduplication technology is used to cut down on the amount of data needed to create backups. HP's D2D Backup Systems use target-based, hash-based inline deduplication that cuts data into small chunks and compares it on the fly.

Thanks to this deduplication, bandwidth savings of 95 percent are possible when transporting data over a WAN using low bandwidth replication. Low bandwidth replication can even be "throttled" to use a percentage of an existing WAN link so the performance of other applications doesn't suffer.

HP makes "scale-down" deduplication devices that are ideal for ROBO locations. Corporations can use them to create an end-to-end system that consolidates data from among remote and branch offices, regional data centers, and main data centers.

A key difference between HP and its competitors when it comes to D2D backup systems is price. HP often charges half what competitors charge for comparable systems. A low-end HP D2D backup system like the HP 2502i starts at around $5,000.

HP makes it cost-effective to replicate dedupe backups between sites (many-to-one replication). If a corporation wants to replicate 20 sites to one it purchases a license for just the one site.

HP also builds its product using ProLiant server technology.

"We really designed these products to be very easy to use," said Mike Ewell. The setup is wizard-based and takes less than an hour to complete. There is no maintenance except the occasional, easy-to-handle firmware upgrade. All of the management is done using a web-based console that uses drop-down menus.

The removal of tape from the ROBO environment doesn't mean there's no place for tape in the larger data protection plan. "Tape is still an ideal long-term archival medium and still plays a role in regional and corporate data centers, but it's transitioning from daily backup to long-term storage", Ewell said.

By adding a tape layer at the corporate data center, corporations can use disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) as a long-term archival and disaster recovery plan.

"Backup to disk and dedupe are not disaster recovery," Ewell said.

That's not a problem for HP, which helps organizations solve both short-term and long-term data protection issues. And when it comes to long-term archiving on tape for disaster recovery, HP is a leader in tape drives as well.