Data Center Backup Auburn

What you need to know about data center backup in Auburn

Regardless of whether your data center is a shrinking legacy of your existence before the cloud or a major part of your operations, it needs to be backed up. Data center backups can be challenging but they are manageable with the right knowledge, the right approach and the right tools for the job. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about data center backup in Auburn.

Steps Involved In Data Center Backup

You need to know your assets

From the outside, it may not look like data centers change much. In fact, you could argue that they don’t. Fundamentally, they’re all made up of broadly similar infrastructure such as servers and storage, cables and cooling. From the inside, however, the situation is very different. Unless you’re running a very basic data center, perhaps just until you finally complete a migration to the cloud, the chances are that your data center is going to contain a whole range of environments, operating systems, and applications as well as different sorts of data.

You need to know your digital assets in-depth

It can be hard enough to keep track of physical assets and fairly large-scale digital assets such as operating systems and applications (and configuration data and hosts and management consoles). It can be even harder to keep track of data, let alone to organize it in a meaningful way and yet this is often one of the most essential tasks in business.

As an absolute minimum, you need to be able to identify sensitive data and data which is needed for legal/compliance purposes e.g. tax data and ensure that both are treated appropriately. You also need to be able to identify any other data which is essential to your core operations and any data which needs any other form of special treatment. This last category would typically include anything you would prefer to keep confidential.

Preferably, you should then go on to identify, categorize and make a management plan for all other data you hold so that you end up in a situation in which you are only holding data for which there is an identified need or a clearly-defined (and legal) want. There should then be a plan in place to manage that data, keeping in mind that if data is worth storing it is worth storing properly and that means taking into account that, left unattended, digital data will degrade over time regardless of what storage medium you use.

Ideally, you should be in a situation where you not only have three copies of your production data with one copy being kept off-site, plus a data archive but that you should have all of your production data segmented so that you can restore whole servers in sequence rather than restoring data piecemeal across servers.

You need to spend money to save money

These days, it’s effectively impossible to manage the backing up of even small data centers without technological tools. Companies with small data centers might be fine with hardware-based solutions or cloud-based solutions (Backup-as-a-Service) although the former are very vulnerable to technical failures. Companies with larger and/or complex data centers, however, will almost certainly need a software-based solution or, at least, a hybrid solution that is part software and part BaaS.

The good news is that it is often possible to find reasonably-priced data center backup management software, which can fulfill all, or at least a substantial part of your needs. You should, however, be prepared to pay for performance. You should also be prepared for there to be gaps in the performance of any single piece of software, which you will need to plug with an alternative tool.

The bad news is that you may only be able to find the right software solution for your needs after extensive research and thorough testing in real-world situations. That being so, it’s strongly advisable only to look at data center backup software which can be evaluated for a decent period before purchase. The industry standard is 30 days and you need to make the most of this.

Choosing the right storage for your needs

Your local backup will be taken to physical media, which essentially means hard drives, SSDs and/or tapes. Hard drives are prone to failure and SSDs are still very expensive. Also, when SSDs fail they tend to do so without warning and it’s very difficult to recover data from them. This means that many businesses still stick with tapes, although they may run data through SSDs first to deduplicate and compress it.

The cloud is becoming increasingly popular as an off-site storage location. The fact that it is online does mean it loses the “physical firewall” effect, but it also means that recoveries can be undertaken much more quickly.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced data center backup partner in Auburn, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.