Enterprise Backup Boost

Data protection has always been a central IT responsibility, but as data continues to expand at exponential rates and policies about data retention and availability become more stringent, IT managers need to be absolutely confident in the technology protecting their core applications.

In this package, eWEEK Labs examines several pieces of the data protection puzzle and evaluates some of the newest products designed to advance the state of the art in backup.

Even within a single company, different departments and applications will have very specific data protection needs. And with shrinking budgets and intense pressure to find cost savings anywhere possible, IT managers now more than ever need to know what kind of data they have and how often that data is created and updated—the key to finding the most suitable and cost-effective data protection systems.

Despite all the improvements made in disk-to-disk backups (thanks to the emergence of ATA-based storage units) and data replication technologies, the core application in any data protection strategy is—and should be—tape backup.

Why tape? For one thing, its removable, allowing organizations to store data off-site. It has also proved reliable. The same cannot be said for optical technologies such as DVD, which so far havent been tested over any significant time frame.

eWEEK Labs recently evaluated a number of products that should be considered as part of an organizations data protection strategy.

We evaluate three tape drives that sit in the midrange of the market. While tape drive vendors typically tout maximum throughput numbers, we set up our testbed to reflect real-world backup window scenarios.

Moving beyond tape backup, StorageTeks new EchoView E400 appliance allows IT managers to continuously keep track of and protect data with the kind of restoration capabilities that high-end servers provide. (See review.)

On the client side, we tested Connected Corp.s Connected DataProtector 7.0 (see review), a compelling system that makes backup of remote systems more effective with its data reduction and optimization capabilities.