Asigra Report Highlights Benefits of Virtual Disaster Recovery, Deduplication

The report noted capital costs are reduced by the reduction of storage requirements using advanced global deduplication.

Businesses and service providers using cloud-based backup and recovery solutions are achieving "significant returns" on IT investments, according to internal field research released by cloud backup and recovery software provider Asigra.

The returns cited include major reductions in hardware and software investments, greatly reduced maintenance- and support-related expenses and better use of IT resources to focus on more strategic IT objectives.

The report said the advantages are being driven by technologies that allow unrestricted reach of cloud-based data protection and recovery across mixed virtual operating system and physical environments for holistic data protection to eliminate the traditional cocktail of backup and disaster recovery applications to purchase, manage and maintain. "The acquisition, management and maintenance costs of a managing multiple islands of data protection for virtual environments, databases, business systems, communications and disparate operating environments is mitigated with an open cloud backup solution," the report said.

The study found that capital costs are further reduced by the reduction of storage requirements using advanced global deduplication. Rather than inefficient deduplication scenarios, such as redundant deduplication, which unnecessarily tax CPUs and slow system operations, global deduplication occurs only where necessary to reduce data load before traveling across the LAN or WAN to the cloud.

"Global deduplication has proven to significantly reduce hardware requirements without impacting backup performance at both small and large enterprise operations," the report said. "The intelligent management of this backup data using tiered recovery technologies then allows the user to align recovery time objectives and storage costs based on the value of the data, which is set by the user through policies."

Asigra Cloud backup is designed to offer backup efficiencies unavailable with traditional backup architecture by allowing organizations to capture less, ingest less and store less data-reducing the amount of backup assets to buy, manage and maintain. Global deduplication technology is designed to prevent redundant data when backing up data to the local recovery appliance and cloud storage.

The company claimed global data deduplication makes the process more effective and increases the data deduplication ratio (the ratio of protected capacity to the actual physical capacity stored), which helps reduce the required capacity of storage hardware for backup data. Asigra Cloud Backup also offers the option of having multiple tiers of recovery, which is achieved through backup lifecycle management, local-only backup and system-agnostic storage interoperability.

For virtual disaster recovery, restoring from one hardware configuration to a different hardware configuration is performed without reinstalling software applications, patches or services packs. With the solution's ability to restore to disparate hardware configurations, there is an inherent capability to restore physical servers to virtual servers (P2V) while preserving the granularity of restoring individual files required for backup software platforms. With this capability, the software provides a means to recreate a company's physical environment within the realm of a virtual environment.

"With the cloud backup market continuing to climb and a growing number of solutions entering the market, users are confronted with an increasing number of options to choose from," said Ashar Baig, senior director of product marketing for Asigra. "While cloud backup can provide major advantages, customers can truly escalate their returns by selecting those solutions with features matched to their needs."