Organizations have long wanted to experience the thrills of non-disruptive backups and instant application recoveries. Yet the solutions delivered to date have largely been the exact opposite offering only unwanted backup pain with very few of the types of recovery thrills that organizations truly desire. The new Dell DL4300 Backup and Recovery Appliance successfully takes the pain out of daily backup and puts the right types of thrills into the backup and recovery experience.
Everyone enjoys a thrill now and then. However individuals should want to get their thrills at an amusement park, not when they backup or recover applications or manage the appliance that hosts their software. In cases like these, boring is the goal when it comes to performing backups and/or managing the appliance that hosts the software with the excitement and thrills appropriately reserved for fast, successful application recoveries. This is where the latest Dell DL4300 Backup and Recovery Appliance introduces the right mix of boring and excitement into today’s organizations.
Show Off
Being a show off is rarely if ever perceived as a “good thing.” However IT staff can now in good conscience show off a bit by demonstrating the DL4300’s value to the business as it quickly backs up and recovers applications without putting business operations at risk. The Dell DL4300 Backup and Recovery Appliance’s AppAssure software provides the following five (5) key features to give them this ability:
- Near-continuous backups. The Dell DL4300 may perform application backups as frequently as every five (5) minutes for both physical and virtual machines. During the short period of time it takes to complete a backup, it only consumes a minimal amount of system resources – no more than 2 percent. Since the backups occur so quickly, organizations have the flexibility to schedule as many as 288 backups in a 24 hour period which helps to minimize the possibility of data loss so organizations can achieve near-real time recovery point objectives (RPOs).
- Near-instantaneous recoveries. The Dell DL4300 complements its near-continuous backup functionality by also offering near-instantaneous application recoveries. Its Live Recovery feature works across both physical and virtual machines and is intended for use in situations where application data is corrupted or becomes unavailable. In those circumstances, Live Recovery can within minutes present data residing on non-system volumes to a physical or virtual machine. The application may then access that data and resume operations until the data is restored and/or available locally.
- Virtual Standby. The Dell DL4300’s Virtual Standby feature complements its Live Recovery feature by providing an even higher level of availability and recovery for those physical or virtual machines that need this level of recovery. To take advantage of this feature, organizations identify production applications that need instant recovery. Once identified, these applications are associated with the up to four (4) virtual machines (VMs) that may be hosted by a Dell DL4300 appliance and which are kept in a “standby” state. While in this state, the Standby VM on the DL4300 is kept updated with changes on the production physical or virtual VM. Then should the production server ever go offline, the standby VM on the Dell DL4300 will promptly come online and take over application operations.
- Helps to insure application consistent recoveries. Simply being able to bring up a Standby VM on a moment’s notice for some production applications may be insufficient. Some applications such as Microsoft Exchange create check points to ensure it is brought up in an application consistent state. In cases such as these, the DL4300 integrates with applications such as Exchange by regularly performing mount checks for specific Exchange server recovery points. These mount checks help to guarantee the recoverability of Microsoft Exchange.
- Open Cloud support. As more organizations keep their backup data on disk in their data center, many still need to retain copies of data offsite without either moving it to tape or needing to set up a secondary site to which to replicate the data. This makes integration with public cloud storage providers to archive retention backup copies an imperative. The Dell DL4300 meets this requirement by providing one of the broadest levels of public cloud storage integration available as it natively integrates with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and Rackspace Cloud Block storage.
The Thrill of Having Peace of Mind
The latest Dell DL4300 series goes a long way towards introducing the type of excitement that organizations really want to experience when they use an integrated backup appliance. It also goes an equally long way toward providing the type of peace of mind that organizations want when implementing a backup appliance or managing it long term.
For instance, the Dell DL4300 gives organization the flexibility to start small and scale as needed in both its Standard and High Capacity models with their capacity on demand license features. The Dell DL4300 Standard comes equipped with 5TB of licensed capacity and a total of 13TB of usable capacity. Similarly, the Dell DL4300 High Capacity ships with 40TB of licensed capacity and 78TB of usable capacity.
Configured in this fashion, DL4300 series minimizes or even eliminates the need for organizations to install additional storage capacity at a later date should its existing, available licensed capacity ever run out of room. If the 5TB threshold is reached on the DL4300 Standard or the 40TB limit is reached on the DL4300 High Capacity, organizations only need to acquire an upgrade license to access and use the pre-installed and existing additional capacity. This takes away the unwanted worry about later upgrades as organizations may easily and non-disruptively add 5TB of additional capacity to the DL4300 Standard or 20TB of additional capacity to the DL4300 High Capacity.
Similarly the DL4300’s Rapid Appliance Software Recovery (RASR) removes the shock of being unable to recover the appliance should it fail. RASR improves the reliability and recoverability of the appliance by taking regularly scheduled backups of the appliance. Then should the appliance itself ever experience data corruption or fail, organizations may first do a default restore to the original backup appliance configuration from an internal SD card and then restore from a recent backup to bring the appliance back up-to-date.
The Dell DL4300 Provides the Types of Thrills that Organizations Want
Organizations want the sizzle that today’s latest technologies have to offer without the unexpected worries that can too often accompany them. The Dell DL4300 provides this experience. It makes its ongoing management largely a non-issue so organizations may experience the thrills of near-continuous backup and near-instantaneous recovery of data and applications across their physical, virtual and/or cloud infrastructures.
It also delivers the new type of functionality that organizations want to meet their needs now and into the future. Through its native integration with multiple public cloud storage providers and giving organizations the flexibility to use its virtual standby feature for enhanced testing to insure consistent and timely recovery of their data, organizations get the type of thrills that they want and should rightfully expect from a solution such as the Dell DL4300 Backup and Recovery appliance that offers industry-leading self-recovery features and enhanced appliance management.