Backup Systems

Backup Systems

Backup has become one of the most vital processes in the business world today. With businesses having multiple servers with 100’s of GB’s of important information, losing it all would surely ruin the business. That’s why backups are important weather they are full backups, daily, or even incremental. There are many different technologies out there, each with their own pros and cons.

The most common backup method is by using tapes. Tapes are just what they say, they are magnetized cassette tapes with large storage capacities in the 100’s of GB’s. These tapes allow the server(s) to be backed up on either 1 or few tapes depending on the size of your business. While this technology stills remains the dominant force in industry. A lot of the other backup technologies are quite expensive and come with a lot o overhead, which why a lot of companies like to stick to Tape drives. Sun has recently released a tape drive that will hold up to 1 TB of compressed data, which is a huge gain for tape users. The tape drive itself uses Fibre channel technology, which is optical wiring, which is much faster than IDE or any other methods. The drive works at a rate of 120MB/sec, which is four times faster than the product Sun produced prior. It also can encrypt any and all data it writes to the tape. While this tape is an amazing improvement for tape, it still lacks in one very important feature. The restore time is still not that good. While the drive is supposed to work faster, it still isn’t fast enough for companies who need a very fast recovery time.

One backup technology that is recently new to the Market is virtual tape. “Virtual tape is the ability of a disk drive to mimic a tape library for backup and recovery purposes. A variety of vendors have adopted virtual tape, including established companies such as EMC Corp., IBM and Storage Technology Corp. and start-ups Diligent Technologies Corp. and Sepaton Inc.” Virtual Tape allows companies to backup data faster. (about 30%) and recover almost twice as fast (90%). This makes this technology ideal for any one needing the faster restore time over standard tape that handle the more expensive product. Along with virtual tape libraries, IBM has recently introduced a Virtual tape library to the market. “IBM's Virtualization Engine TS7510 is the first of what is expected to be a series of virtual tape libraries. It combines hardware and software to provide tape virtualization for Unix- and Intel-based servers that connect to Fibre Channel storage systems. Virtualization Engine is a rack-mounted server that scales to 46TB of capacity and runs the Linux operating system.” This technology works through a special server and software. This sever acts like a standard tape library but it takes the data and writes it to disk on the server. Since writing data to disk is faster than writing it to tape, this allows the network to go back up immediately after writing to disk, lowering down time. Then from there the attached tape