World Backup Day. It’s world backup day this Saturday, which stands as a friendly reminder to make sure your files are backed up. If you go on the World Backup Day site you’ll see that their slogan this year is, “Don’t be an April fool. Backup your files. Check your restores.” Good advice…but let’s expand.
The picture to the left is of the Rock of Gibraltar—crown property of the United Kingdom. So what does it have to do with Backup? The saying, “solid as the Rock of Gibraltar” is typically used to describe someone or something that couldn’t be defeated and would not fail. The “rock” metaphor is used in many instances to describe a “solid foundation”. In homebuilding we start with the concrete foundation – which mimics rock – and acts as the support and anchor for the house itself.
When you’re building a home it’s common to think of the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, windows, kitchen appliances, paint, roofing materials, even landscaping. But do you really pay any attention to the formulation of the concrete that will serve as the foundation for your dream home? Do you think about whether you have the right amount of rock, sand, and cement to make the concrete solid? Of course not. Probably the only time you would think about that stuff … is if your house fell down after moving in!
For many businesses, that’s how backup is perceived. It gets very little mindshare. Unless, however, you do it wrong, and you’re not able to recover when you need to. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting that backup needs to replace other initiatives currently at the top of your list of strategic plans for the next fiscal year. What I am saying is that backup needs to be viewed as a key element to that strategic plan and that without a proper backup and recovery solution (the foundation), the bells and whistles of virtualization, cloud, and other innovative technologies (the dream house) will cause unnecessary strain on the backend in the form of unmet SLAs, exploding costs, and endless frustration. The foundation has to be ready-made so you can build off it any other initiative!
Where the foundation does not have the capabilities to support building new initiatives on top of it, companies face having to "patch up" their foundation as they go. Like introducing a VM only solution for their virtual machine backups or spending loads on target deduplication without taking into consideration the costs of moving that data day in and day out over the network. And it’s not the company’s fault…no vendor has put all the technologies together in one product to be that foundation and to serve as the platform to build off of, except NetBackup.
The incredibly innovative thing about NetBackup is that everything you need to support the transformation of your data center (think about building your dream home) is already built in – the foundation is SOLID. Getting closer to virtualizing mission-critical applications? Support is already built in. Want to leverage dedupe at the client, media server, or target? Yep, done. Thinking about backing up to the cloud, or maybe you are the cloud and want to back yourself up? Covered. Want to use WAN-optimized replication for central management and near-instant DR testing capabilities? Got that too. Want all of that and much more delivered in a single Appliance? Check.
Having a solid foundation allows you to build a dream home without worrying whether or not it will stand firm against the storms or stand strong under the weight of your rooftop helipad (Bay area traffic would be a thing of the past). Similarly, having the NetBackup Platform as your data center foundation allows you to not only weather torrential data growth and other storms, but also to take full advantage of the innovative stuff like virtualization and cloud without buckling under the strain—an advantage not shared by NetBackup competitors. And again, the best part is that you can manage all of this from a single console, dealing with a single vendor.
So, Happy World Backup day. And instead of thinking about not being an April fool … think instead about how you can be an April hero with the NetBackup Platform. While you’re at it, check out our ZBOARD Contest in celebration of World Backup Day.
Learn more about NetBackup and what it can do for your organization here: http://www.symantec.com/netbackup
Or have a Symantec Specialist contact you.
