Backup to disk

With the availability of larger and larger disks at ever decreasing prices, disk becomes a viable alternative for tape as a backup medium.

Using disk for backup purposes can have significant advantages over tape. Most vendors of so-called backup to disk solutions however deploy a technique called "tape emulation", where they write a single, sequential file containing the backup data to disk, as if it where a tape streamer. Although this approach has some merit, as it requires only minor changes to the existing storage and backup infrastructure, virtual tape or tape emulation is a compromise that sacrifices many of the advantages that backup to disk could deliver, if implemented in its native mode.

The IASO solution

IASO has designed a backup to disk solution that fully leverages the random access nature of the disk medium. The advantage of this design is that all backup data is directly accessible and continuously available online. Using our advanced data reduction technology, it is possible to keep as many as 50 - 80 full backups online on disk, on a volume not larger than the original data set.

Large files support

Although several other vendors claim to have implemented similar mechanisms, the IASO implementation is unique. It is extremely fast, requires no extra disk space for temporary files and probably most importantly, it is also suitable for very large files, such as databases. Using the Application Support Modules for MS Exchange and SQL Server, IASO Backup Manager is able to apply the very advanced block technology to very large Exchange or SQL databases, up to several 10s of Gigabytes per single file!

The restore advantage

Did you know that roughly 99% of restore operations are performed to retrieve a single file or directory from the backup? Think of the letter for yesterdays customer you are changing today for another customer and then you forget to use "Save As" rather than "Save"... Or the directory that disappears because you hit the "Del" key once too many. Or the email message you are convinced should be in your archive, but isn't. Trying to get those data back from a tape backup is very cumbersome. First you have to convince the systems manager that the data is important enough to retrieve the backup tape from its store, which shouldn't be on the premises to begin with. Than the tape needs to rewind and be indexed and then fast forwarded to the approximate location of you data. Several hours have passed in the mean time, if not days.

With IASO Backup to disk, single file restores are extremely fast and convenient. The backup server is randomly accesible and keeps all data online, all the time. Retrieving data is a matter of "point and click" and a file restoration takes a few minutes instead of hours or days. This is how backup to and restore from disk is supposed to be.