This document discusses the need to redesign backup and recovery systems to address increasing data storage needs. It outlines some of the drawbacks of traditional tape-based backup systems, such as slow speeds, high costs, and complex management. The document then introduces disk-based application protection solutions as a better alternative that can provide faster backups and restores, data deduplication to reduce storage needs, high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, and easier management through a single solution. It provides questions to consider when evaluating backup technologies and resources on AppAssure Software, a provider of disk-based backup and recovery software.

1. BACKUP AND RECOVERY REDESIGN.
DO MORE WITH LESS… REALLY!

2. Table of Contents
 Backup and Recovery Redesign
 Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
 A Better Way
 Give It a Test
 Resources from AppAssure
 What AppAssure Customers Say

3. Backup and Recovery Redesign
Do more with less… really!
Any company that relies on data intensive
applications like e-mail, financial, human
re-source, customer management, and
product development systems – and
that’s every company – is experiencing
data explosion.
Mandated by legal compliance and
required by management best practices,
data protection measures including
backup, storage, and re-trieval, are more
mission-critical than ever.
On top of that, demands for high availability and fast disaster
recovery are increasing.

4. Backup and Recovery Redesign
Do more with less… really!
Unfortunately, enterprise‐wide solutions that rely on tape backup are
less efficient and more costly than ever.
New disk‐based backup solutions that focus on application – not just
data – protection are redefining the state-of-the-art by realizing
significant time and money savings through:
 data expansion moderation
 fast backup
 easy data retrieval
 high availability assurance
 and reliable disaster recovery

5. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
Enterprise-wide tape backup
Not so long ago, but in the last century, companies rapidly increased their reli-
ance on electronic data. E-mail and other corporate systems (financial, human
resources, product development, etc.) systems added great efficiencies. We
can’t imagine a corporation without them. They also required new diligence for
data protection; backup, storage, and retrieval systems became mission-critical.
It is still typical for an organization to rely
on an enterprise-wide tape backup
system to protect their data. Those
enterprise-wide systems were adopted with
the expectation of gaining cost-efficiencies
including greater leverage with hardware
and software vendors and IT staff ability to
build expertise with one feature set.

6. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
Enterprise-wide tape backup
In reality, traditional tape backups are time and money resource drains.
They don’t efficiently address disaster recovery and they actually
complicate everyday demands for system availability and mailbox or
message retrieval.
tape
The scale has tipped and tape backup tape backup
costs have far outweighed benefits. backup benefits
costs

7. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
“Backup administration is the largest consumer of storage staffing
resources, as organizations in the Fortune 1000 indicate on average,
20% of their resources are allocated to backup and recovery tasks.”
theinfopro.com
As data protection costs have exploded along with data growth, they’ve
caught the attention of budget‐cutting CIOs.
Why do so many
backup administration
systems
consume so much of the
budget devoted to data
protection?

8. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
1. Backup systems are slow and inefficient.
It’s typical for a tape-base system to require hours for a full data store
or data-base backup. System overhead often requires administrators to
wait until applications are not in use before running a backup. Of course,
applications like e-mail are almost constantly in use; asking users to log
off and wait – especially for hours at a time – is a productivity killer.
That means that full‐backups are often
run at night or on weekends.
Administrators either tend to the
process or leave the office with fingers
crossed that everything works.

9. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
1. Backup systems are slow and inefficient.
Retrieving data is also a time-
consuming process. Administrators
mount tapes and search through
archives to find missing messages or
lost entries and then go through a
variety of processes to restore the
data for the end-user.

10. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
2. Storage is expensive.
It’s Tape is cheap unless you’re
constantly buying it.
As data stores continue to grow, buying
more and more tape drives and tape
becomes… less… and… less… cost
effective.

11. Yesterday’s State-of-the-Art
3. Traditional systems are hard to manage.
Enterprise-wide tape backup effectively increases your staff, media,
and hardware budgets. That’s ironic since they were adopted to curb
those costs.
Again, the continual doubling of data
stores has imposed processing
overhead that takes staff time, sucks
up storage, and requires greater
and greater processing power.

12. A Better Way
"Backup has emerged as the leading area of focused improvement for Fortune
1000 storage organizations in 2007. Front end storage growth, regulatory
compliance and increasing data retention times have created a need for backup
innovation to maintain the highest levels of data protection."
Robert Stevenson, Managing Director for Storage, theinfopro.com

13. A Better Way
The call to protect corporate data in less time and for less money has
inspired a whole new way of thinking about backup – a complete backup
redesign. Rather than relying on tape and focusing on data, new
technology utilizes disk space and focuses on applications. Think about
it, if a server crashes or a server room floods, end-users need fast
access to restored applications, application states, and application data.

14. A Better Way
Those capabilities alone outpace traditional tape backup but the time and
cost savings realized through disk-based application protection is equally
compelling. Bare metal restore and single message retrieval processes take
minutes rather than days or hours leading to huge downtime savings.
Gartner estimates that system downtime costs are calculated at
$25/user/hour of downtime.
And companies are experiencing backup
data reductions as high as 60% which
significantly reduces the budget for
tapes and their storage.

15. A Better Way
Goodbye tape, hello disk
Rather than backing up once a
day or once a week and storing
data on tape, disk-based
application protection programs
run continuously, taking snapshots
and copying only changed blocks
to a server.
Compressed and deduplicated data
is stored as a point-in-time image
that includes the operating system
and system state along with
application data.

16. A Better Way
That makes it much easier to retrieve and restore lost data whether a
single e-mail message or entire database. Rather than mounting and
searching through backup tapes to locate needed data and then restoring
that data to an application – a process which takes at least hours –
administrators using disk-based application protection conduct
restores in minutes.
For a complete server restore, the
admin can rewind to the last “good”
point-in-time image. End‐users pick
up where they left off just minutes
before.

17. A Better Way
Some disk-based application protection solutions also include the
ability to mirror a protected server on a virtual server – maybe one in
another location. These “standby” servers are ready to go at a
moment’s notice which is perfect for fast disaster recovery.
As obvious as it is, it bears pointing out
that ad-ministrators no longer have to
budget for tape and tape drives. While
“storage is cheap”, tape has to be
bought, stored, retrieved, and
maintained.
None of that overhead is required
by disk-based protection.

18. A Better Way
Combining Backup, Recovery, High Availability, and
Retention
With all the overhead imposed by tape backup, it only delivers one benefit – data
protection. But disasters require full-application restores as do some more
mundane system failures – a server crash for instance.
Disk-based application protection delivers backup, recovery, high availability,
and retention capabilities in one solution. The “one solution” approach brings
the same efficiencies that a single,
enterprise-wide tape backup approach
sought to afford:
one application to learn and
maintain, fewer hardware and
software vendors in the mix.

19. Give It a Test
Combining Backup, Recovery, High Availability, and
Retention
Companies attempting to save time &
money on backup, restore, disaster
recovery, and high availability should
make sure evaluated technologies can
answer “yes” to these questions:
1. Does the product take advantage of application‐specific innovations?
2. Is it possible to conduct a live recovery of all or a portion of the application
quickly and easily?
3. Will you be able to rollback from bare metal to and from any environment
(P2V, P2P, V2P, V2V) to meet disaster recovery requirements?
4. Does the product monitor the health of backups?

20. Give It a Test
5. Will the product significantly shorten your backup window today and
into the future through an efficient volume‐based approach?
6. Is data expansion moderated with deduplication and compression?
7. Will the technology handle the range of recovery situations – single
e‐mail messages to full‐blown disasters – with reliability, ease and
speed?
8. Does the product support continuous
export of images to standby or virtual
machines?
9. Is the restore process flexible with
images transportable to USB, NAS,
DAS, and DAN?

21. Resources from AppAssure
AppAssure Software is a provider of innovative backup and disaster
recovery software that has been purpose‐built for Windows applications.
Designed to protect the applications, not just the data, AppAssure solutions
deliver high-value features for reliable data protection that is corruption-free.
Using a centralized server architecture, AppAssure
solutions feature off-host processing that will eliminate
backup windows and enable a live restore for a down
application.
As a result, IT administrators can have
the confidence that their Windows
applications are completely protected
and easily recoverable in the event of
data loss or disaster.

22. Resources from AppAssure
AppAssure is a member of VMware Technology Alliance
program, a Microsoft Partner, as well as the member of
other technology partnerships with leaders in the industry.

23. Resources from AppAssure
AppAssure is the world’s fastest and
easiest backup and disaster recovery
software for Windows application servers
and desktops.
The only complete “all-in-one” backup and
disaster recovery software solution,
AppAssure enables local recoveries from
any type of failure in just minutes, with the
added assurance of offsite application and
data backup and recovery from a total
site disaster.

24. What AppAssure Customers Say
Brendan Hourihan – Technology Services Network Engineer, Flagler College:
“With AppAssure, I thought I entered into a dreamland! Finally I’m
talking with somebody who has a philosophy about backups that
makes sense – a more logical approach to how data is backed up
AND what you can do with the backed-up data: you can replicate it,
synchronize it, and more!”
Peter Hammerl – IT Administrator, Hamilton Port Authority:
AppAssure is working great. I’ve tested restoring files and databases,
and everything has gone smoothly. The application is pretty granular
so we can choose what to backup, at what time intervals, etc. We
can get exactly what we want when we want it.”
Eric Sagerdahl – IT Analyst, Walden House:
“We’ve always been happy with the support … if you really need to
talk to somebody right away, there’s always someone right there for
you... I honestly don’t know how we would have recovered all the
data before AppAssure.”

25. Questions
If you have questions about AppAssure Backup & Replication software,
please select an option below to contact us:
 Sales: sales@appassure.com
 Support: support@appassure.com
 Phone: +1 (703) 547-8686
 Web: www.appassure.com
Download a FREE trial of AppAssure Backup & Replication at
www.appassure.com