Disk-to-Disk Backup

Business continuity is no longer a luxury for Fortune 1000 companies alone. It has become a business imperative for most organizations.

Successful business continuity requires that corporate data is reliably backed up and available to your employees, regardless of external forces. In addition, governmental regulations also mandate specific levels of data backup and restoration, which adds new requirements to corporate data availability.

Together, these conditions require that data administrators build a backup and restore process that is very fast and highly reliable.

Enter Disk-to-Disk Backup Technology

To address these challenges, more enterprises are turning to disk-based backup solutions in conjunction with existing tape technologies. Supplementing your tape backup environment with disk-to-disk backup technologies can deliver several significant benefits:

• Reduce backup window and shrink restoration from days to minutes
• Provide seamless integration with existing applications
• Offer simplification of offsite data transfers

Business Benefits in Detail:

Affordability with High Scalability

Storage administrators who are considering disk-to-disk deployments generally view disk backup devices as secondary storage and expect prices to be low. The Pillar Axiom™ design ensures a very competitive price because it does the following:

• Uses SATA disk drives
• Features off-the-shelf components

Despite its competitive price, the Axiom can scale to over 300 TBs of capacity, which allows a single system to address the disk backup needs of even the largest enterprise.

Robust Backup Performance

Administrators expect disk backup systems to significantly accelerate their backup operations. With the Axiom, administrators deploy service plans that allocate the ideal level of cache and disk resources for robust backup performance.

As the amount of storage grows, it is important that no bottlenecks impact system performance. To ensure that it delivers performance that scales with capacity, the Axiom:

• Features individual RAID controllers for each incremental disk enclosure
• Allows up to four data movers, called Slammers, to be added to each system

Intuitive Set-up

The AxiomONE Configuration Manager ensures a fast and easy set-up for disk-to-disk backup. It does so by:

• Requiring only six clicks to set up LUNs or file systems for disk backup
• Providing a recommended service plan to optimize disk backup operations

Simplifies the Storage Infrastructure

One primary advantage of the Pillar Axiom for disk-to-disk backup is that it was designed to host disk backup and primary storage on a single platform. This means that the standard practice of buying storage for individual application needs as they arise, including disk backup, will no longer be necessary.

The benefits of multi-hosting include:

• Reduction of storage management costs by presenting a common interface for all storage pools
• Elimination of inefficient storage silos
  
  

Configurable as Virtual Tape Library (VTL)

When storage administrators decide to integrate disks into their backup operation, they frequently want to minimize the impact to their existing backup infrastructure. VTL technology allows end users to benefit from the faster backups and restores which disk technology enables without requiring changes to the processes they have in place.

Pillar has partnered with leading VTL vendor, FalconStor Software, to make the Axiom configurable as a VTL. When combined with the affordability, scalability, performance, ease-of-use, and multi-hosting benefits of the Axiom, the Pillar/FalconStor VTL provides a compelling solution for end users.

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