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Simply Business Protection

LAN-based backup solutions

A LAN-based backup solution best fits a business or department that runs continual business processes and has several servers and workstations connected to a LAN that need to be backed up. If your business has some or all of these characteristics you may benefit from a LAN solution:
Operates a continuous, business-critical operation
Has unpredictable data growth
Requires hourly or daily backup
Has more than 5 networked servers
Supports multiple operating systems
Has already deployed a backup system
Is looking for a scalable, cost-effective solution
Needs to automate the backup process
In a LAN-based backup scenario, the backup management server can be connected to either the main LAN or a dedicated backup LAN. A dedicated backup LAN is recommended in situations where performance degradation in the main LAN because of backup volume is not acceptable. On a dedicated backup LAN, disk agents placed on servers and workstations push data over the LAN to the backup server, which then writes the data to tape or to some kind of disk array, such as disk-to-disk (D2D) backup systems.
A LAN-based backup solution is perfect if you want to automate your backup process and schedule backups on certain servers at certain times without manual intervention. For a smaller network, you could use an autoloader containing a single tape drive. On a larger network with a greater capacity requirement, you might select a tape library. Compared with standalone tape drives, these LAN-connected drives bring significant resource savings and reliability improvements to the DAS backup approach.
Capacity and performance planning are the keys to selecting the appropriate LAN-based backup device. The first step is to calculate the daily backup volume for each server and workstation. When you consider performance, keep in mind that a dedicated gigabit backup LAN will transfer data at about 80 MB/second as long as the media server has sufficient processing power to support the transfer.

Considerations

As you consider LAN-based backup as a solution for your business, keep the following in mind:
A LAN-based data protection solution is limited to a maximum theoretical storage rate of 3600 GB/hr based on a gigabit Ethernet LAN But on a practical level, it's unlikely that your organization will achieve anything like that rate based on protocol overhead
A dedicated backup LAN will give you the best overall performance by segregating the user traffic and the backup traffic on to two separate paths. Because you're not mixing user traffic with backup traffic, you maximize performance for both users and backup
If you require a higher capacity and/or faster backup, a tape library with multiple drives (learn more about tape libraries), or a backup server with multiple Disk-to-disk (D2D) systems attached (learn more about D2D backup storage options) may be your best option

An HP LAN solution

An HP LAN solution most likely includes a combination of these hardware components (exact products may differ within product families):
HP workstations and servers on a LAN
HP workstations and servers on a LAN
HP Workstations
HP ProLiant servers
HP Integrity servers
NAS storage plus print services
NAS storage plus print services
HP StorageWorks NAS 1200s
Scalable NAS System
HP StorageWorks Disk-based Protection Systems
HP StorageWorks Disk-based Protection Systems
StorageWorks D2D Backup Systems
StorageWorks Modular Smart Arrays (MSAs)
HP StorageWorks Tape Libraries and combined disk and tape solutions
HP StorageWorks Tape Libraries and combined disk and tape solutions
StorageWorks MSL Series Tape Libraries D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape) systems
Note: HP StorageWorks NAS devices are servers that connect the systems that you need to back up with a tape solution, taking the place of a direct connection between a tape drive and a single system.
»  Next: Backing up remote offices and mobile users

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» Overview
» DAS backup solutions
» LAN-based backup solutions
» Backing up remote offices and mobile users
» HP's tape technologies
» Which HP data protection solution is right for you

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