Remote or branch offices are increasingly at the front lines of business – they have the closest contact with customers and partners and therefore have a dramatic impact on the success of the business. Many, if not most, of these offices run autonomously from headquarters and are responsible for managing their own operations – including protecting and retaining the electronic information that they generate. Ignoring the protection and recovery needs of this distributed data is simply not an option.
As companies expand operations into new markets, the percentage of total corporate data in remote offices is increasing. However, many companies are not adequately protecting these assets. It’s no wonder – this is a very complicated problem and can be extremely expensive to solve completely, considering all the things that can go wrong with remote office data:
- Accidentally or maliciously deleted files – you need a way to easily and quickly restore these assets at the file level from a local backup copy of the data
- Virus, worm or hacker attack – you need to restore your systems and data to a point in time before the attack
- Corrupted database – you need to ensure that your backup data is ‘application-consistent’, meaning that all parts of recent, complex database transactions are included in the backup
- Disk or server crash – you need to be able to quickly restore at the volume level, and to restore operating systems and applications, even on different hardware
- Local or regional disaster – you need a recent copy of your data in another location that is outside the potential disaster area, with the ability to quickly restore the affected workloads
Couple these challenges with the lack of skilled and dedicated IT staff in most remote offices and you can see that there is a great deal of business risk associated with data in these offices.
IBM offers solutions for remote office data protection and recovery that are automated, easy to use and cost-effective. These solutions offer enterprise-class data protection at small business prices, and integrate seamlessly with core data storage management solutions in the data center, such as Tivoli Storage Manager.
The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack family of remote office solutions provide:
- Local, automated, continuous data protection for any Windows or Linux data asset.
- Selective replication to the data center or other site for remote office disaster recovery, business resiliency, backup consolidation and integration with central data lifecycle management processes.
- FastBack Server sends data over the LAN/WAN into TSM 6.2 Server. TSM Client side deduplication can be enabled to save bandwidth
- FastBack enables instant restore protected disk volumes, allowing users to access to their data or application immediately, while the restore is taking place in the background.
- Bare Machine Recovery to similar, dissimilar or virtual Windows systems, as well as to Linux servers.
- Granular recovery of individual Microsoft® Exchange e-mail objects.
For smaller offices, a Tivoli Storage Manager backup/archive agent can be deployed on the local servers, and send deduplicated, incremental backup data to a central TSM Server.
For the employee desktop and laptop systems in remote/branch offices, IBM offers Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Workstations. This cost-effective solution automatically and continuously backs up new and changed files as they are saved to disk, and periodically sends an incremental copy of the data to a central TSM Server.
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