Today, almost every business relies on a collection of critical data that is growing every day. As the amount of data residing on servers, desktops and laptops expands, businesses must have a solution in place that protects their data, minimizes the daily backup window, allows for a short recovery time objective (RTO) and keeps costs under control.
BUMI (Backup My Info!) provides a solution that helps businesses meet these objectives by leveraging our agentless multi-platform software, BUMI Archiving, and local storage solution (for LAN-speed restores).
A Recovery Strategy That Makes Sense
Although most companies now recognize the need to backup their data, few consider the importance of having a comprehensive recovery strategy in place. BUMI gives clients a customized solution encompassing both backup and recovery.
RTO: Right now!
There is some data that, when lost, will bring a business to a halt. We recognize that every minute spent recovering this data can mean lost productivity and lost revenue. This is why we work with clients to develop a strategy that will bring back the most critical, highest priority data immediately. A strategy that uses our vault storage solution along with our local storage feature will allow the client to recover data at LAN-speed and run multiple restore jobs simultaneously, drastically reducing the recovery time.
RTO: Next Day
For older data, data that has not changed for a selected period of time, or other data that does not require immediate recovery, BUMI Archiving is an ideal, low-cost solution. Archived data can be restored through a private web portal online. For security data is downloaded in an encrypted state, then can be restored through the BUMI software portal in the client's office.
If a very large amount of data needs to be restored, our team can ship this data overnight in encrypted and compressed format on optical media or a USB hard drive which can then be restored rapidly. (As always, a BUMI engineer will be remotely connected to assist in all recovery procedures and we are available 24 hours a day for emergency support.)
The Results
By providing our customers with a customized recovery strategy on top of solid, secure backups, BUMI is able to satisfy clients' recovery time objectives, manage the exponential growth in companies' critical data, and manage storage costs while reducing the backup window which can be crucial for businesses that need 24 hour uptime.
A Real Life Example
The benefits of a well-planned, cost-effective recovery strategy can best be seen by looking at what BUMI has done for one of our customers.
We work with a marketing research company that has over 440GB of critical data. Some of that data is Exchange email, some resides on a file server and some of it is from a proprietary application for their business which runs on a SCO UNIX server.
Recovery Time Objectives:
If this client experienced data loss as the result of a server crash or other disaster, they would need to recover the last 3 months of their email, the last 365 days of their file server data and the last 3 months of their UNIX data in order to get their business back up and running immediately. The rest of their data could be restored a day later without interruption to their productivity.
BUMI constructed archiving rules on their backups to reflect this client's RTOs. The immediately critical data is backed up to BUMI's online vault. Older data that can be shipped for next day restores gets pushed to the BUMI Archive for lower cost storage.
Local Storage = Instant Recovery:
This client has a dedicated network storage location for our local storage feature. Using local storage, the BUMI software pushes a copy of the backups to this location while simultaneously sending encrypted data to our data center server. Using local storage, the BUMI software can restore files from the local copy over the client's local area network, making recovery as fast as a file transfer.
Time-Based Archiving Rules:
In order to control the amount of data which remains in BUMI's online vault, and manage costs, we created rules that push older data to BUMI Archiving after a certain period of time in the online vault.
Delta Blocking for Short Backup Windows
Although we are protecting over 440GB of data for this client, nightly backups usually run in under one hour, sometimes as fast as 20 minutes. This is due to BUMI's delta-blocking technology, which identifies changes made to a file and backs up only those changes, rather than the entire file.
The Numbers:
| Data | Client Side (Uncompressed) | BUMI Online Vault (Compressed) | BUMI Archiving (Compressed) |
|---|---|---|---|
Public Folder Backup |
130GB |
15GB |
43GB |
Employee User Profiles |
90GB |
11GB |
38GB |
MS Exchange Emails |
96.5GB |
6GB |
64GB |
SCO UNIX |
124GB |
7GB |
24GB |
Totals |
440.5GB |
39GB |
169GB |
If the client were not pushing data to BUMI Archiving, they would have approximately 208GB stored in the BUMI online vault. By designating which data needs to be restored immediately and which does not, the client reduces the online vault storage amount to 39GB and moves 169GB to the lower-cost BUMI Archiving solution. The result is a customized backup and recovery strategy that fitst the recovery objectives and cost requirements of this client.
