Backup Software for Larger Systems

A Backup Article Contributed by Andrew Whitehead

Backup Software for Larger Systems

For a systems administrator, one of his most important roles is backing up, and being able to restore, the organizations data. When he chooses his backup software, to ensure that they meet his requirements he must evaluate the product's backup features and also take a long hard look at its restoration and disaster-recovery capabilities . The size of his system, the platforms he wants to protect, and the existing of backup strategy he has deployed are the all factors influencing this decision.

Scalable Backup Software

For a large system environment, the chosen solution must be able to scale with the environment. Being able to handle networked and multiple storage libraries, both in shared and multihosted configurations, is important to companies with large amounts of data to back up. To gain the maximum throughput, some backup software packages exploit the multiple drives and media in storage libraries by sending multiple data streams, and interleaving the data from multiple sources to media.

This give useful performance gains for backup but is not so good for restores, so backup software with user-configurable features are necessary for choosing the best approach within an existing environment. If there is more than one administrator multiple concurrent consoles are available, backup software that supports browser-based consoles from anywhere on your network increases flexibility

Multi-Platform Backup Software

Any backup software has to supports all the platforms in use, and all the applications whose data is being protected. A lot of enterprise-class backup software offer add-on agents for back up and restore under a variety of operating systems, or performing database and messaging server backups live. For those backing up Windows 2000 servers, find a product with a backup and restore capability for Active Directory (AD) and the System State.

Backup Software with Integrated Disaster Recovery

An integrated disaster-recovery options is also worth considering, as it can help to quickly and efficiently rebuild a crashed system, though some RAID controllers do not support the use of disaster-recovery boot disks. Before investing in integrated disaster-recovery and backup software, it is essential to verify that it supports the hardware. Making sure that the software uses tried and tested implementations of the features required can avoid a lot of problems.

Fitting Backup Software into the Overall Strategy

The backup window, and the frequency and type of backup jobs need to be evaluated to find backup software that supports both the scheduling needs and the hardware required to meet the required throughput. If disaster-recovery and archive copies of media are kept off-site, the backup software must still be able to perform restores efficiently with as much automation as possible to minimize the opportunity for human error.

Time spent evaluating a product demo is never wasted, and reveals how easy it is to configure and operate. Not only for simple tasks such as installing remote agent software or configuring and scheduling backup jobs, but also for disaster-recovery scenarios that determine whether the product can handle a worst-case scenario - where the largest Return on Investment is found.