Bravura Networks Blog

By Brad Reeves, Technical Writer

Sleep well knowing your data is safe

In such a technologically driven world virtually everything, businesses especially, rely on computers to generate reports, place orders, and even get lunch. Have you ever thought of what would happen if your computer died? Even worse, what if one of your business critical servers went down? I took numerous classes on “risk management” in college but I have never once thought about the subject for more than a minute since then.

A recent study discovered that, of companies experiencing a “major loss” of computer records, 43 percent never reopened, 51 percent closed within two years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent survived over the long-term. Now that we know the statistics what is the most reliable solution to stay protected? I’m glad you asked.

If you Google “backup and recovery software” you will literally get millions of links about possible solutions. Let’s take a look at some of the most common solutions and discus the advantages and disadvantages:

Tape
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data stored on a magnetic tape. Although many argue this is the most cost effective way to create backups, which I’m not going to argue, it is also the most unreliable. Analysts estimate that anywhere from 42 to 71 percent of tape restores fail. So in the unlikely event of a failure your odds of retrieving data are rare. If for some reason the tapes were good, even though they have been sitting in the closet for 4 years with an inch of dust on them, the process of retrieving the data is painstakingly long and tedious. Because they are literally “tapes” and are not random access the tapes first have to be analyzed entirely to be able to see the data, which takes time.

Ray Schikschnus, a business system engineer who deals with backup configurations for many large companies said, “If tapes are so good why does everybody want DVD’s and not VHS’s?” He highly suggests sticking to hard drives to back up data.

External Hard Drive
Backing up to an external hard drive is better than not backing up at all but still an ancient method. When a failure does occur and the data is backed up, the greatest cost incurred is now time. It can take days if not weeks to resolve hardware damage and if you have 30 people on payroll that can add up.

Hard drives are of course more reliable than tapes but corruption is still possible. It is recommended that someone checks the data by opening some of the backup files to check for data integrity. This kind of backup configuration may be the most cost effective because all one needs is to purchase an external hard drive and connect it to the server or PC, however, the more individual backup units you have the more likely it is that one of them will fail.

BIT Support™ COP
Continuous Operational Protection is by far the most comprehensive backup solution on the market. This solution combines the idea that backups should be on hard drives and addresses the many problems of conventional backup solutions. This method consists of one physical machine in house. Let’s look at the BIT Support™ COP in a little more detail:

Near real time backups: Bravura’s “Incremental Forever” methodology captures all changes to the initial image in increments of 15 minutes. The Incremental Forever technology not only backs up recent datasets but also allows end users to reconstruct the state of their data as it stood at the end of various 15-minute restoration points.

On site virtual Server: If any of your servers fail, our server virtualization technology embedded in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) allows customer servers and applications to be restored and rebooted in less than 1 hour in most cases. As you may sometimes endure a wait of several days in order to receive replacement servers from vendors, your NAS can have your business up and running. The NAS multitasks so that, even while functioning as a virtual server, it can continue to back up data from other devices plugged into the NAS. Our technology thus allows you to remain in business without any significant loss of data backup, server functionality, or application downtime.

A complete image: We generate an image of all hard drive partitions via an agent, which is warehoused on the NAS device physically located at your location. The data is stored using AES-256 bit encryption and compressed. We employ a block-level, not file-level, backup, which means that data is captured at the level of 1’s and 0’s. Block level data is raw data which does not have a file structure imposed on it. Database applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server transfer data in blocks. Block transfer is the most efficient way to write to disk and is much less prone to errors such as those that result from file-level backups. Additionally, block level backups are not affected by open files or open databases. The block-level image is an exact digital duplicate of the on-site server.

Secure remote Storage: After imaging the servers to which it is attached, the NAS device then creates an independent 256-bit encrypted tunnel and transmits the imaged data to a secure offsite location where it resides in an encrypted, compressed format. That remote site then replicates again to an alternate data center, creating a total of three copies of the data in three geographically distinct regions. Since the data is encrypted and only you have the key, no one has access at any of the remote storage facilities.

This method protects against virtually any kind of failure, from hardware to software to a natural disaster. For more information please call Bravura Networks and ask about our award winning BIT Support™ COP.

Ray Schikschnus is a Business Systems Engineer with Chicago-based Bravura Networks, Inc.

Contact Brad Reeves at breeves@bravuranetworks.com