Centralized Data Backup Won't Cripple Your WAN

The need to be close to customers, manufacturing facilities and specialized labor have required organizations to extend the traditional concept of "headquarters" to offices and factories hundreds or even thousands of miles away. However, along with the opportunities that come with workforce globalization, come the realities of dealing with data that sprawls across the organization. Whether the data is at the Munich branch or at HQ in New York, it is equally susceptible to loss, requiring that data recovery and security plans apply to all parts of the organization, regardless of location.

To protect company data and ensure its availability to users, IT organizations have been conflicted between two backup approaches. The first approach, local tape backup, requires that tape libraries be present wherever there are servers in racks. Local area network (LAN) access to the servers gives administrators fast data backup and recovery. The newer approach, centralized backup, puts high-density tape libraries in one location to which data from servers around the world is backed up. While centralized backup requires less hardware, reduces administration time, and solves the security problem associated with loose tape media, it can introduce greater bandwidth consumption and longer backup/restore windows. Because of these issues, centralized backup has been a leap some managers have not been willing to make.

With the right wide-area data services (WDS) technology, a more scalable and secure data protection model can be implemented without the expense of an expanded WAN.