All companies back up their data at every location. Historically, that’s been accomplished by individual tape drives at each branch. The challenges began in remote offices where there was no local IT staff. Who changes the tapes? Does anyone take them offsite?

As local data volumes grew and remote sites ran applications beyond file and print, the frequent question became “what do you do when your previously established backup window isn't long enough anymore?”

Backup and replication over the WAN ensures that data can be safely protected at a distance from the primary site. With the growing importance of disaster recovery, enterprises are relying more heavily on WAN-based backup and redundancy.

VistaOne has Your Back
Riverbed's WAN optimization solutions transparently accelerate all backup and replication applications that utilize TCP. Riverbed's Disaster Recovery Acceleration, powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), can cut backup windows by 300% or more. Since Riverbed reduces WAN bandwidth use by 60 to 95%, organizations can reliably back up data across the WAN without interfering with other applications.

In data communications, bandwidth-delay product refers to the product of a data link's capacity (in bits per second) and its end-to-end delay (in seconds). The result is the maximum amount of data on the network circuit at any given time--data that’s been transmitted but not yet received.

The product is particularly useful for protocols like TCP that guarantee reliable delivery. A network with a large bandwidth-delay product is commonly known as a long fat network (shortened to LFN and often pronounced "elephant"). A network may be considered an LFN if its bandwidth-delay product is significantly larger than 105 bits (~12 kB).

Utilizing a powerful set of tools that include special optimizations for high bandwidth-delay products, Riverbed can even accelerate network backup and replication across connections where there are no bandwidth constraints. This enables more frequent replication and provides better protection for primary data centers.

Riverbed's approach allows enterprises to continue using whatever WAN backup application they choose. Riverbed's appliances will work with products from the leading vendors:

EMC Network Appliance Legato Veritas Tivoli

Microsoft CommVault DoubleTake CA And others…

With Riverbed’s performance optimizations in place, organizations can dramatically change the way they deploy backup and replication tools across the organization. They can

• Back up servers over the WAN continuously or near continuously
• Use network backup to ensure secondary data centers have the most recent data in a failover
• Eliminate tape backup devices from remote offices altogether

With no changes required to either host-based or array-based backup and replication tools, Riverbed's solutions can accelerate backup and replication in some of the most complicated environments anywhere. These solutions have been used to accelerate WAN backup from small, 5-person offices with fractional T1/E1 lines to large data centers with virtually unlimited bandwidth.

Riverbed products accelerate backups over international and satellite connections around the globe. They’re even effective in vehicles on the move, like ships connected via satellite.

Blue Coat
Organizations on more restricted budgets that need to back up exploding data volumes with existing bandwidth, Blue Coat WAN optimization tools can streamline the process significantly.

Blue Coat can help you overcome the performance and availability problems associated with TCP data backup and recovery. Their solutions optimize your entire network infrastructure, moving more data with less bandwidth. They deliver:

• Byte caching to prevent data duplication
• Bandwidth control to ensure backups get the resources they need, when they need them
• TCP optimizations to overcome latency-induced bandwidth limitations
• Desktop acceleration software to provide roaming or displaced users with fast application access, regardless of distance or network routing complexities

Both vendors allow businesses to more reliably protect data, effectively respond in the face of disaster, dramatically cut costs associated with backup and replication, and streamline IT so that technical staff can spend their time doing things other than managing backup processes.

Resources:

Riverbed Video: Delivering faster backup and disaster recovery.

Discover how to accelerate disaster recovery and reduce network spending with Riverbed.

Optimize Disaster Recovery (Riverbed)

Performance Brief: CommVault Galaxy Backup & Recovery (Riverbed)

Performance Brief: Symantec Veritas NetBackup (Riverbed)

Performance Brief: Microsoft Data Protection Manager (Riverbed)

Data Backup with SnapMirror (Blue Coat)

Application Performance Brief: noMax Products (Blue Coat)

Application Performance Brief: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Performance (Blue Coat)