Tape Virtualization

Many organizations are struggling to meet escalating backup and recovery service-level requirements. Rapid growth of information in the production environment is the root cause. The prime concern and the real driver for most of the challenges in this space is the continued fast growth of information in the enterprise.

Most Industry Analysts believe the growth rate is approximately 60% per year. As IT budgets remain basically flat, this immediately suggests that businesses need to start thinking differently about how they deal with enterprise information growth. Not only is new information entering the enterprise more quickly, but more of it is accumulating over time in response to corporate policies and more stringent governmental regulations around data retention. This has multiplied the amount of information IT needs to care for in the environment.

The current methods that many rely on for backup and data retention simply cannot keep up. Backup-infrastructure size and growth is tied directly to the size and growth of the production environment. As production capacities grow, so does the backup.

We have also found that many customers are relying on periodic backup images as their solution for long-term data retention. This causes a management headache for information retrievals and further swells the backup environment.

Common Backup Problems can be addressed as:

• Performance - Not meeting backup windows or restore service levels.
• Availability - Limited reliability of tape infrastructure.
• Management - Constant optimization and tuning of environment.
• Media Management - Lost tapes or time to restore media.

Benefits of Disk based Solutions:
• Performance - Upto 3x increase for backup and 5x for restore.
• Availability - Address high availability and reliability requirements.
• Management - Ensures a longer lifetime and improves productivity.
• Media Management - Data can be remotely copied and easily restored.

	Open Systems Tape Virtualization (Backup-to-Disk)
	Many organizations are struggling to meet escalating backup and recovery service-level requirements. Rapid growth of information in the production environment is the root cause. The prime concern and the real driver for most of the challenges in this space is the continued fast growth of information in the enterprise. Most Industry Analysts believe the growth rate is approximately 60% per year. As IT budgets remain basically flat, this immediately suggests that businesses need to start thinking differently about how they deal with enterprise information growth. Not only is new information entering the enterprise more quickly, but more of it is accumulating over time in response to corporate policies and more stringent governmental regulations around data retention. This has multiplied the amount of information IT needs to care for in the environment. The current methods that many rely on for backup and data retention simply cannot keep up. Backup-infrastructure size and growth is tied directly to the size and growth of the production environment. As production capacities grow, so does the backup. We have also found that many customers are relying on periodic backup images as their solution for long-term data retention. This causes a management headache for information retrievals and further swells the backup environment. *Common Backup Problems can be addressed as:* • *Performance* - Not meeting backup windows or restore service levels. • *Availability* - Limited reliability of tape infrastructure. • *Management* - Constant optimization and tuning of environment. • *Media Management* - Lost tapes or time to restore media. *Benefits of Disk based Solutions:* • *Performance* - Upto 3x increase for backup and 5x for restore. • *Availability* - Address high availability and reliability requirements. • *Management* - Ensures a longer lifetime and improves productivity. • *Media Management* - Data can be remotely copied and easily restored.

	Backup to Disk Solution Disk libraries help you meet higher service levels by delivering the performance and reliability benefits of disk-based backup and recovery. Unlike standard ATA capacity for backup to disk, disk libraries emulate your current tape infrastructure. The operational processes that you’ve built around your tape environment don’t need to change: Your backup applications do not need to be upgraded to a new version that supports disk media, because the disk library actually “looks like” tape. This means you can seamlessly integrate it into your environment—and begin to benefit from it very quickly and easily. And-- you don’t need to learn how to use array-management tools to provision storage and mask LUNs, as a tape library is a single-purpose system designed specifically for backup and recovery. Ultimately, disk libraries make it easy for you to take advantage of disk for backup and recovery.
	EMC's Disk Library It provides you with backup and restore you can depend on. Its optimization of data compression, its simple-to-implement design, and its support of existing backup operations make it a cost-effective solution: It is built on the proven, reliable, and affordable CLARiiON platform… • It leverages ATA disk technology. • It takes full advantage of RAID-based disk storage for better data availability than a tape-only approach can provide. • It provides in-band data compression of up to 3:1 for lower usable cost per gigabyte. • It is highly scalable. • It supports the emulation of multiple tape-library types. • It’s independent of the primary storage. Business Benefits • High Performance - Single stream performance of 90 MB/s and aggregate performance of 1200 MB/s. • Can emulate 64 individual libraries and 512 tape drives. • Plug-and-Play capabilities for existing open-system environment. • Can create a native tape for offsite storage. This can be done policy based. • RAID groups are pre-configured by EMC before shipping so it is pretty quick to install. Why Eastern? • E-Proven EMC Velocity2 Premier Partner. • Experts in Business Continuance, SANs, Open-Systems and Mainframe Solutions. • Open-Systems Backup, Archive, Recovery and Disaster Recovery expertise. • Trusted advisor status in Fortune 500 Companies. • Multiple engagements delivering EDL solutions. • Complete professional services offering to deliver a turn-key solution. • Proven working relationship with EMC.