Back Up Technologies

After 20 years of building solutions for our customers, we know that the one area of IT that most often gets overlooked is that of backups. Backups is the one thing always left on the ‘to do’ list although conversely, every IT department keeps it on the ‘to do’ list because they know how serious recovering data could be following planned or un-planned down-time.

The typical question that our customers ask CMS around building a backup solution is ‘what should we back up and how’ Our question to our customers is ‘what applications are most critical and how long could you do without them’

That is why we deliver solutions from a number of vendors, rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We know that no two customers are the same. Our customers have different compliance issues, different size back up requirements, differing infrastructures and complex integrated applications. After some considerable thought and planning, we decided to build our solutions around three vendors with backup solutions that complemented our service proposition around the infrastructure. Those vendors are Veeam who offer a powerful suite of backup solutions around the virtual infrastructure, Microsoft Data Protection Manager and Symantec Backup Exec.

(Symantec logo)
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help their customers and partners – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organisations – secure and manage their information against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently they claim, than any other company. Symantec’s unique focus is to eliminate risks to information, technology and processes independent of the device, platform, interaction or location.

Symantec Backup Exec delivers reliable backup and recovery designed for growing businesses. It is designed to easily protect more data while you reduce storage and management costs through integrated de-duplication and archiving technology.

(System Centre Logo)
Data Protection Manager (DPM) is part of the System Center family of management products from Microsoft. It delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualisation and file servers -- as well as Windows desktops and laptops.

DPM seamlessly uses disk, tape, and cloud-based repositories to deliver an easy-to-use and best-of- breed backup and recovery solution for Windows environments from Microsoft. Windows customers of all sizes can rely on Microsoft to provide a scalable and manageable protection solution that is cost- effective, secure, and reliable. One single DPM server will protect up to 100 servers, 1000 laptops or 2000 databases. As part of the new version of DPM 2010 there are enhanced disaster recovery options for long-distance data protection and business continuity initiatives.

DPM also provides site-to-site replication for Disaster Recovery to either another DPM server or the CMS Managed Cloud. Centrally managed System State and Bare Metal Recovery are also now part of the latest version of DPM.

(Veeam Logo)
Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance partner, develops innovative products for virtual infrastructure management and data protection. Veeam is an international company with North American headquarters in Columbus, Ohio and European headquarters in Reading, UK. Veeam has more than 10,000 customers worldwide and is currently adding new customers at the rate of 600 per month. The company’s free FastSCP tool is used by more than 120,000 VMware professionals, making it the most widely used tool to help manage VMware.

The company was founded in 2006 by the team previously behind Aelita Software, well known for its Windows Server management solutions. In 2008, Veeam acquired nworks, adding enterprise management solutions that bridge the gap between VMware and enterprise systems management frameworks from Microsoft and HP.

Veeam offers a powerful suite of products to better manage VMware, including Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Reporter for enterprise reporting, change management and capacity planning for VMware. Veeam Monitor is for performance monitoring and alerting across multiple vCenters.

Veeam Backup & Replication is the first enterprise-ready solution that combines backup and replication in a single product for fast recovery of your VMware ESX and ESXi environment.

• 10+ times faster for incremental backups
• Up to 5 times faster for full backups
• 80% lower cost for near-continuous data protection (CDP) compared with traditional CDP
• Up to 30 percent lower storage costs
• Increased reliability by leveraging the latest vStorage technology