In the POWER i world we tend to want to back up a large amount of data in a very short period of time. With the development of dedupe technologies, whilst this can achieve a significant drop in the amount of data that ultimately goes to tape, this is still far too much to send across a wire to a secondary site.
With Intel solutions often using disk in the backup process it does not matter that it takes 12 hrs to get backed up data to a second site but the standard backup architecture for POWER i does not give POWER i users this luxury.
As a result I think POWER i users who need data off site and view 3rd party offsite storage to not be acceptable need to rethink their backup architecture.
Whilst there was initial interest in Virtual Tape when announced at V5R4, few clients implemented it. Where we have customers using it they are seeing very high throughputs, in some instances 600 to 700GB per hour. You will be hard pushed to achieve this with physical tape.
With data saved quickly to virtual tape, this data can then be put to local tape as well as using IBM ProtecTIER, to dedupe and replicate the backup to a second site.
The only issue that still remains is bandwidth. Whilst bandwidth costs have reduced high bandwidth over distance for backups may still be deemed a luxury.
Applied Technologies are working with a company that offers an appliance that can reduce the impact of network latency improving throughput significantly. Initial tests have seen throughputs of 50GB/hr, or effectively improving the performance of a 1Gbe from 2.5MB/s to 100MB/s.
Combining virtual tape, ProtecTIER and the WAN Accelerator can deliver remote backups with the added benefits of saving offsite storage and having an electronic copy of all data to improve remote server restore times.
If this topic is of interest please contact nigel.gillespie@applied-tech.co.uk
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