Think of the first half of this article as "Remote Backups 101." The second half covers a representative selection of corporate centralized backup systems, online backup services and locally attached removable storage devices. Note that this is not a comprehensive review; space constraints limited us to listing only a few products in each category, and these are presented in alphabetical order. Most of the enterprise backup software vendors we spoke to for this article can handle laptop backups when attached to the local network, but we were interested only in those with tools specifically designed for remote backups. On a side note, several of these products offered interesting alternative uses for bandwidth while the remote user is attached, including software administration, asset management, file synchronization, content push and other administrative features.
Corporatewide centralized backup is the most sophisticated and manageable option. By integrating remote backups with your existing methodology, you can use existing onsite secure network storage; operate under a common management interface; use existing reporting and compliance tools; and easily provide updated versions of complex datasets, such as inventory databases. Several of the major enterprise-level backup providers that we polled offer add-on modules or standalone software tailored to the mobile user; we've compiled a sampling here:
Altiris Recovery Solution 6.0 Altiris' proprietary Redundant File Elimination technology builds a database and stores a pool of shared files common to all systems in your backup scheme. This serves as a core reference for all future backups and reduces the required amount of enterprise storage by eliminating the need to store multiple instances of system and application files. Files unique to each user's system are logged separately into the database and stored under that user's system profile.
The backup server is "seeded" with common and user-specific files through an initial (and time-consuming) full backup; future backups, which Altiris calls "snapshots," are compared with the existing database and only new or modified files are transmitted. To further reduce bandwidth requirements, file comparisons are done at a block level, and the results are compressed before transmission to the host.
Restoration options vary from a simple Web-based file restoration to a history-based rollback that can restore a damaged system to a previously known state. You also can create a hidden drive partition with a bootable Linux kernel, providing a complete local-restore capability; the hidden partition can be used for optional local backup if an Internet connection is not available.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
