Backup Exec 2014 Blueprints - Remote Office Protection

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The Technical Services team for Backup and Recovery have produced a number of documents we call "Blueprints".

These Blueprints are designed to show backup and recovery challenges around specific technologies or functions and how Backup Exec solves these challenges.

Each Blueprint consists of:

• Pain Points: What challenges customers face
• Whiteboard: Shows how Backup Exec solves the customer challenges
• Recommended Configuration: Shows recommended installation
• Do’s: Gives detailed configurations suggested by Symantec
• Don'ts: What configurations & pitfalls customers should avoid
• Advantages: Summarizes the Backup Exec advantages

Remote Office Protection

Market changes in recent years have made cloud-based backup and recovery technologies attractive to both small businesses and Managed Service Providers who are looking for better solutions to the problem of storing backup data at offsite locations for disaster recovery. There are also many instances that need the ability to backup remote offices or sites.

For years, removable media solutions, such as tape, have been used to solve this problem. Now both businesses with remote offices as well as Managed Service Providers are looking for automated, less complex solutions.

Managed Service Providers also commonly leverage Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools, to help with the command and control problem of offering services to a large number of individual small businesses.

Successful and automated backup and recovery operations at remote sites can be a difficult goal for administrators to achieve. Administrators need the ability to protect critical IT resources at remote office locations and store copies of backup data offsite, but often lack sufficient manpower at remote offices to handle the management of removable media storage devices commonly used for backup, such as tape.

Managing smaller environments can be as challenging as a result of the natural growth process companies experience over time, IT environments may experience changes that can increase the difficulty of achieving a successful data protection strategy. Some of these changes may include the following:

• Increase in the number of critical data and application servers that need to be protected
• Increase in the amount of data in the environment
• Increase in the number and complexity of backup servers and associated storage devices
• Additional company sites or locations

The Backup Exec™ 2014 Enterprise Server Option is designed to help IT administrators and Managed Service Providers meet the backup protection needs of growing companies. The Enterprise Server Option includes tools to scale a backup infrastructure and associated management capabilities to meet the needs of a growing environment. The Enterprise Server Option includes two components, which are as follows:

1. Central Admin Server Option (CASO)
2. Advanced Disk-based Backup Option (ADBO)

CASO and ADBO are optional components that can be leveraged to expand and scale the capabilities of a Backup Exec™ 2014 environment.

Central Administration Server Option

The first component of the Backup Exec™ 2014 Enterprise Server Option is the Central Admin Server Option (CASO). CASO can help address a number of key problems associated with large or growing environments, including centralized management and monitoring of backup servers, load balancing of backup operations, centralization of backup data, and offsite disaster recovery.

Centralized Management and Monitoring

One of the most important capabilities that CASO enables for administrators is the ability to centrally manage and monitor backup and recovery operations across multiple Backup Exec servers in an environment. This includes protection policy configuration and deployment, backup server management, storage device management, reporting, as well as the ability to monitor the status of protected servers and associated active alerts.

You can download the full Blueprint from the link below.