Data Center Backup West Sacramento

What Is Data Center Backup In Sacramento?

If you have a data center, then you need to back up your data, operating systems, applications, configurations, infrastructure (including mobile devices), and any virtual hosts and management consoles. That’s a lot to manage so you need a strategy combined with the right tools for the job. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data center backup in West Sacramento.

Easy To Get Data Center Backup

1. Always remember the why

Always remember that the whole point of a data center backup is so that you can restore from it if necessary. This means that you need to think about the results you want to achieve in terms of Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives and then work backward from there to determine what actions you need to take and what resources you need to finance to achieve those objectives.

If you’re struggling to reconcile your business goals with your financial realities, then you might want to look at your option for implementing a tiered recovery strategy. The basic idea is to bring your business-critical data online first and then recover the rest of your data as quickly as you feasibly can.

2. A note on data center backup and disaster recovery

When it comes to disaster recovery, the first key point to remember is that it takes more than a data backup to make a disaster recovery solution. You need to think about everything necessary to get your organization up and running again (or at least up and walking), hence the importance of backing up resources such as operating systems, applications, and so forth.

The second is that you need to prioritize data that supports not just your everyday operations, but also any legal obligations you have such as regulatory compliance. You’re also going to need to think about the management of encryption keys.

Last but not least, it’s preferable to organize your data sets so that your backups replace complete servers one after the other. This can take quite a bit of upfront effort but it really can pay dividends in recovery situations, particularly disaster recovery situations.

3. Your retrieval times will be heavily influenced by the type of backup you take

Full data backups are important but they require significant resources for the backup process itself and make for lengthy restores (albeit straightforward ones). Incremental data backups only back up data that has changed since the last data backup. They require the least resources to perform but they often make for lengthy restorations. The reason for this is that each backup effectively functions as a chapter in a book and you need to restore each chapter one at a time before you have the whole book available again.

Differential backups only back up data that has changed since the last full data backup. This means that they require more resources to perform than incremental data backups (although less than the full data backups) but restoring from them can be a whole lot easier and quicker.

4. Choosing the right storage for your needs

In practical terms, data center managers have to choose between local storage (such as network-attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), and tapes), the cloud, or both.

Most data center managers are going to want two data center backups, one local and one off-site. The nature of data centers means that local is effectively going to mean “on physical media”, so the decision turns on choosing the right physical medium or media.

Data centers are increasingly using a “disk-to-tape” strategy of using solid-state drives to act as a buffer for tapes (or the cloud). SSDs support file indexing, which means that they can deduplicate and compress data before forwarding it. This can significantly improve transmission times and also cut costs.

It is also possible to use SSDs on their own. This may be necessary if you want to achieve top recovery speeds, but it does carry risks. SSDs are prone to failing unexpectedly and, rather ironically, their nature makes it very hard to recover data from them (and time-consuming and expensive). Similar comments apply to regular (mechanical) hard drives. They achieve decent speeds but are very vulnerable to failure.

Once you’ve chosen your storage medium or media for your local data center backup, you then have to choose between taking physical storage off-site to a storage facility or just using the cloud (or a combination of both).

Even companies that have traditionally been wary of the cloud have started coming around to the idea of using it as a storage location for their data backups. It’s more convenient than moving physical media and security standards are high and improving all the time.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data center backup partner in West Sacramento, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.