SageNet makes backup and disaster recovery fast, simple and cost-effective

These days, businesses survive disasters only if their data survives.  But many business owners are so busy running day-to-day operations that they don’t dedicate time to prepare for hypothetical events that could impact operations. Given the relative scarcity of major disasters and the potential cost of traditional business continuity solutions, organizations commonly prioritize disaster planning right out of the budget.

The price of failing to plan can be catastrophic, however. According to the Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), one of every four businesses forced to close in the aftermath of a disaster never reopens. And it’s not just large-scale disasters that can cause businesses to close. Studies show that unpredictable events such as application failures, viruses, power outages, fires and even plumbing leaks are far more likely to cause major disruptions.

“Contingency planning is a core part of running any successful business. Failing to plan is placing an unnecessary bet on the survival of your business,” said Trey Walling, SageNet sales executive. “Fortunately, SageNet has developed a cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solution that can greatly tilt the odds in your favor.”

SageNet customers now can take advantage of a service allowing them to fully replicate the entire contents of a storage area network (SAN) to a target SAN located in SageNet’s hardened data center facility. Critical data is replicated throughout the day for redundancy and failover. If a server fails, data can be rapidly transferred from the backup site to meet the organization’s recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

To create similar capabilities in house, an organization would have to incur the hardware and software expenses of duplicating their SAN, and would burden their IT staff with the additional maintenance responsibilities.

“Two isn’t always better than one,” said Walling. “With two SANs, you have double the capital costs, the operating expenses and your power costs. You can eliminate all that by taking advantage of the infrastructure and pooled resources that SageNet already has in place.”

A disk-to-disk (D2D) backup system lends speed and reliability to the SageNet solution. Writing backups to disk instead of tape dramatically reduces the backup window — sessions that would ordinarily consume a full weekend often can be completed in less than 12 hours with D2D solutions. In addition, a D2D system eliminates the need for error-prone tape-rotation processes, reduces the number of tape drives an organization must purchase, limits the physical space required for tape storage, and shrinks personnel costs associated with managing a large tape library.

Disk’s retrieval advantages over tape are also beyond dispute. Loading a tape to search for a single file to restore from a week-old backup could take hours, while a similar search from a disk might take only a few minutes or less. The difference becomes even more pronounced if a full server restoration is required.  Recovery speed is an essential consideration these days, given the fast-retrieval requirements of federal regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

SageNet’s D2D solution can also be used in tandem with tape drives to create archival tapes to be stored offsite for disaster recovery purposes. In this disk-to-disk-to-tape scenario, “hot backups” can be created from the secondary disk without taking servers or databases offline. This capability satisfies demands for both more frequent backups and continual application availability.

“Our goal is to make disaster recovery fast, easy and cost-effective,” said Walling. “One of the ways we do that is by deploying backup-to-disk in concert with remote replication. Ultimately, we’re relieving our clients from the financial and administrative burdens of setting up and running their own secondary site, while ensuring that they are prepared in the event of a disaster.”