Automated Storage Options Cut Data Risks

All too often, employees finish the workday without backing up their files, leaving business data at risk. New storage products address that problem by automating the backup and archiving of a variety of files.

Dot Hill Corp. this week will roll out upgrades to its SANpath and SANscape storage-management software. SANscape works with Dot Hill's appliance hardware. Also this week, Veritas Software Corp. will extend some of its backup and recovery capabilities to storage systems that can be used to automatically back up and archive desktop and notebook files.

Patrick Parker, director of data systems at CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco, uses SANpath for backup and recovery and also stores more than 4 terabytes of data on Dot Hill's SANscape hardware, backing up hundreds of Dell PowerEdge Windows servers. "Our SCSI cards had been a point of disaster, and SANPath gave us redundancy and the ability to swap cards on the fly," Parker says.

New SANpath features will include support for IBM AIX servers and the iSCSI and IP network-storage protocols. The new SANscape 2.4 includes support for Dot Hill's SANnet Axis storage appliance and the SANnet Blade 1U (1-inch high) rack-mountable RAID storage system--two upgrades that fit well with Parker's strategy to consolidate software distribution for hundreds of servers. "We could have the appliance at the center, take a snapshot of the data, and roll back to any point on the storage area network," he says. "Minneapolis, New York, and San Francisco could be updated at the same time.''

Veritas NetBackup Pro 3.5 backup and recovery software comes with updates that let IT administrators protect thousands of client systems from a single server, support Windows XP, and configure NetBackup to automatically move infrequently used data to less expensive storage sources such as tape for archiving.

International Data Corp. analyst Fred Broussard says backing up data to a common location can lead to storage overload. Adds Broussard, "Now customers can move some of it from disk to tape, for easier and cheaper archiving."