B E S T P R A C T I C E S
G U I D E
Remote Data Management & Backup with Snap EDR
approach eats up hours of administration time, not
only during initial set up, but each time a business
requirement changes. Some technologies, such as
Adaptec Snap EDR, provide a “set it and forget it”
approach that automates the communication of policy
to the remote node, and have integrated notification if
something does not proceed according to policy.
Wide Area Netowrk WAN) Network Bandwidth
Utilization: Any solution that addresses remote data
must take into account bandwidth restrictions, as well
as a range of network conditions. Remote locations
frequently have varying bandwidth availability that
needs to be shared among multiple applications and
users at particular times. For this reason, remote data
management and movement solutions should have
features that enable efficient use of available
bandwidth such as byte-level differential data transfer,
bandwidth throttling, multi-streaming, and
compression. The amount of network overhead, or
information that is in addition to the data being
transferred, that a product sends over the network is an
important consideration. Obviously, less is better than
more. Finally, since some remote connections will likely
be impaired during some processes, the ability to restart
at the point of failure is critical as well as the ability to
re-route information flow to alternate networks.
Security and Data Integrity: When moving data over
networks, data security is always a major concern.
Networks are always susceptible to intrusion, but
particularly in remote locations where there are fewer
IT controls. As a result, any remote data solution
should authenticate all sending and receiving nodes
prior to any data transfer, and encrypt data during
transmission. Moreover, they should utilize a single
firewall port and minimize firewall rules. The ability
to ensure that data is received with 100% integrity is
also an important consideration. Where tape is used
for remote backup, one of the biggest points of recovery
failure is that data is corrupted on the tape. With some
disk-to-disk backup technologies, data accuracy can be
100% guaranteed.
Remote Process Automation and Application
Interfacing: To minimize or eliminate the need for
manual effort at remote locations, the management
solution must be able to automate processes and
interface with remote applications to access data. For
example, when backing up applications like Exchange
or SQL Server, it is preferable to use native backup
routines. Therefore, the remote data solution must be
able to integrate with the application and invoke the
native backup package as part of the backup process.
Similarly, for applications such as SAP, data must be
accessed through the application to ensure integrity,
instead of accessing it directly at the database,
filesystem, or disk levels. In addition, other custom or
script-based processes may also be needed or required
prior, during or after data transmission. The remote
management solution should automate these as part
of the overall remote backup process.
Heterogeneous System Support:
It is common that a
company with multiple remote locations will have a
variety of computing platforms and applications at those
locations. It is therefore important to choose a solution
that can work within a heterogeneous environment.
While this seems simplistic, many products today only
work within homogeneous environments.
Point-in-Time vs. Continuous Replication:
Continuous replication products continuously
monitor a filesystem and capture changes as they
happen and either replicate them immediately or
cache the information for bulk transfer at a later time.
While these products are ideal for continuous
replication between a small number of systems for
business continuity purposes, they are not ideal for
periodic processes such as backup and archive. Point-
in-time replication products are more appropriate,
and in general will be far more network efficient for
periodic processes such as backup and archive.
Additional Requirements for Remote Data
Backup
Beyond the basic remote data considerations listed in the
previous section, there are some specific requirements for
remote backup that become important as Consolidated
and Disk-to-Disk Backup methods are considered.
Backup at remote offices requires more than just writing
the data to tape. Backup solutions must address data
integrity and accuracy, automatic operation, offsite
storage, and of course, restoration.
When storing user files for backup, it is important that
the integrity of the original data be preserved; the
most important characteristic of a backup is that it
can be restored with full integrity. A backup must
represent the true data status at the time of the
backup. While tape backup software often has the
capability to handle files left in an open state at the
time of backup, it is important that your disk-backup
mechanism have options (skip, open file transfer, or
create error log) for handling open files.
Backup processes for remote offices ideally should
require little or no local manual intervention, but
instead be a completely automated, “lights out”
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