The Test Center chose two technologies for the backup process: drive imaging and traditional tape backup. Drive imaging is a quick method for completely backing up a drive partition. That image can then be saved to a variety of storage devices, ranging from an alternate internal hard drive to NAS to a USB or a FireWire-connected portable hard drive.
Test Center engineers chose True Image Server 7.0 from Acronis to perform the imaging tasks. That product allows the creation of a remote image of a live server's hard drive. No downtime is needed to accomplish the backup of all applications and data. What's more, the image file can be mounted as a volume, and individual files can be retrieved, offering the best of both worlds for data backup. At $499, True Image Server is less costly than many traditional backup software products.
Image files were stored to a $259 60-Gbyte Mercury-On-The-Go FireWire/USB 2.0 portable hard drive from Other World Computing. A portable external hard drive proves to be quite efficient for image storage and restoration. If there is a server or drive failure, solution providers can quickly plug the portable drive into another system and access the image file to retrieve data or restore the image to a compatible server. That allows failed networks to be restored in a matter of minutes.
While imaging to disk proves to be a good first line of defense, the technology can fall short when it comes to multiple backups, archiving or saving data long term. That is the arena in which tape still reigns supreme. While tape proves effective for multiple backups, there is additional management overhead"namely someone has to be responsible for rotating tapes and transporting tapes off-site.
With those issues in mind, Test Center engineers selected a VXA-2 PacketLoader 1x10 from Exabyte for tape backup. That unit is built around autoloader technology and holds 10 160-Gbyte VXA-2 tape cartridges for a total of 1.6 Terabytes of storage. Exabyte breaks new ground in the autoloader market by offering the unit for only $2,499, so almost any business can afford to store massive amounts of data. The primary advantage offered by the unit is that the daily backup process can be completely automated for tape rotation every 10 days. Simply put, no one has to worry about changing tapes on a daily basis. That is important because, in many cases, small-business employees tend to forget to change tapes, thus rendering most tape backups useless.
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