WAN Vaulting

Network-Efficient Replication for Disk Backup and Disaster Recovery

Challenge

Given the large size of backup data, electronic or network-based replication as a data protection method is operationally or economically unfeasible. Most businesses cannot afford dedicated high-speed connections to transport data to offsite storage. Replication has been reserved for very small mission-critical application data, not backup data, and even then it is very costly.

The default data transport choice has been a truck, used to ship magnetic tapes that are unreliable, cumbersome and highly susceptible to human error. According to Gartner, 10% of recoveries from tape fail. One bad tape can cause a restore operation to fail and render the entire series of tape media useless, and often this is not discovered until an actual restore operation is underway and the data is needed for business operations.

Solution

• Data Domain Deduplication Storage systems
• Data Domain Replicator software option
• Existing enterprise backup and archiving software

By significantly reducing data volume and replicating only new and unique data segments in compressed format, Data Domain deduplication and replication technologies enable efficient bandwidth utilization for automatic "WAN vaulting" of any nearline data, including backups. In addition, Data Domain’s Data Invulnerability Architecture makes recoveries highly reliable by verifying that the data is complete and restorable at time of write versus the 10% recovery failure rate that plagues tape.

Beside the obvious advantages of eliminating tape, the major difference between WAN vaulting and tape vaulting is that WAN vaulting allows immediate accessibility to the backup data over the network, making WAN vaulting an infinitely more responsive off-site storage method. By contrast, tape vaulting requires a truck and third party handling services to deliver tapes that still need to be loaded to recover data — again with a 10% chance that data is unrecoverable.

Key benefits of Data Domain network-efficient WAN vaulting include:

• Disaster recovery, providing network-based data protection by securely and automatically replicating backup data to a disaster recovery site
• Remote office data protection, allowing vaulting of data from multiple branch offices to a central hub or data center
• Tape consolidation, eliminating the need to duplicate backup data at each remote office and leaving tape infrastructure only at a central hub with IT staff

This eliminates tape infrastructure from remote offices altogether, providing both centrally managed data protection and automated offsite DR for the remote offices.