Protecting Your Data
Ideally, the best solution for disaster recovery is to avoid it entirely. We'll have you covered whether the cause is hardware failure, corrupt files or accidental deletion. Our dedicated backup engineers check your backups daily to ensure your disaster is met with calm guidance. ANS understands the extreme importance of your data which is why our focus is on recovery not just backup.
Hybrid Local / Offsite backup
Your data starts by being seedloaded onto an external USB 3.0 hard drive or NAS depending on the size of your data set to ensure your bandwidth is conserved when transferring a large volume of data. We bypass the internet and the cloud so that your business doesn't have to slow down for us to backup your data. Then your data is loaded into a resilient storage area network and replicated to additional nodes locally and offsite to additional storage locations. The datacenters have enough fuel reserve to last a week and the ability to concurrently maintain all pieces of infrastructure while still having N+1 redundnancy.
Call us at 407.835.7180 x212 or contact us online for a free backup audit.
Backup Software
Advanced Network Solutions offers an array of solutions. From our proprietary economical backup software offering we have been using 10+ years "ANS Network Backup" to the latest and greatest software Veeam we offer an array of effective solutions right-sized for your small or medium business.
ANS Network Backup
Advanced Network Solutions offers Network backup for Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo physical servers or VMWare / Hyper-V virtualized servers. If you have the software we can find a way to back it up whether it is Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server database, MySQL Database, QNAP/Snology Nas, Microsoft Office365, Microsoft Onedrive, Dropbox. If you have the software we can figure out a way to back it up and most important ensure it restores by checking it daily.
Veeam Data Management
One of the most widely respected backup softwares for critical data is Veeam. A Gartner Magic quadrant leader and trusted by over 355,000 customers worldwide you can be certain that their team creates visionary software with a fanatical focus on speed and reliability. The Veeam Availability platform can meet the simplest needs of a small business or the most demanding contingencies of a large enterprise. Veeam Availability Platform.
What does Advanced Network Solutions utilize to internally backup our own data?
Hypothetically speaking we drink our own koolaid. Before we deploy any solution we test and validate it through quality assurance in our test environment. Once the backup software version has passed QA we deploy it on our own infrastructure. After our isolated test network and our internal networks have been backing up and restoring all of our backup sets successfully for 90 days then only at that point do we unleash new backup software releases to customer environments. Internally for our own infrastructure we utilize a blend of Veeam for lightning fast recovery and ANS Network Backup for long term retention of files with its extremely effective compression algorithms.
Business Continuity Planning - RTO (Recovery Time Objective) vs RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
Advanced Network Solutions will develop and design a backup solution purpose build to fit your business needs.
- Tier 1 - Mission Critical applications that need to be recovered in less than 15 minutes: Veeam is a great fit for this purpose. Veeam Instant VM Recovery will have your virtualized server or group of virtualized operating systems operational in 1-5 minutes depending on how fast the storage has been designed.
- Tier 2 - Business Critical applications that need to be recovered in 1-2 hours: Veeam Full site failover can help if a water line broke above your server room. We can have your entire business operational on standby servers for your users to connect into so quickly your employees won't believe the office is still underwater.
- Tier 3 - Non-Critical applications that can be recovered within 24 hours (traditional nightly backup): If you think of backups as an insurance contingency and cost effectiveness is your main goal our ANS Network Backup can easily get you operational at a much more economical pricepoint with aggressive compression.
Tape Backup
Tape backup is the tried and true method. You thought tape was dead however if you have HUGE volumes of data it is more cost effective than you could imagine and it supports the best of the best backup software VEEAM. Newer magnetic tape storage such as LTO, are reliable, hold large amounts of data, and are good for archiving up to 30 years. Generally the backup takes place at night with the tapes being changed every morning. Normally the tapes are rotated on a weekly or monthly basis, with an occasional tape taken offsite for archiving. For very large amounts of backup data (generally over 50 Terabytes) an autoloader robot can implemented and fit in your existing rack enclosure. This allows a single backup to span multiple tapes without having to manually change the tapes.
- LTO7: An open alternative to DLT with uncompressed capacity of 6,000 GB and compressed capacity of 15,000 GB per tape
- LTO7-m: An open alternative to DLT with uncompressed capacity of 9,000 GB and compressed capacity of 22,500 GB per tape
- LTO8: An open alternative to DLT with uncompressed capacity of 12,000 GB and compressed capacity of 30,000 GB per tape
RAID Arrays (Honorable mention, for clarity this is not a backup)
RAID is not a dedicated backup solution, but rather a method of linking multiple hard drives together for improved performance and redundancy. If one of the hard drives fails, there is another drive with duplicate data so that nothing is lost. There are different "RAID Levels" that determine how the data spans the hard drives:
- RAID 0 (Striped): Blocks of data are stored alternately between two drives. This increases performance and gives you full use of the available disk space, however, it's bad for redundancy and actually increases your risk of losing data if one of the drives fails
- RAID 1 (Mirrored): Each block of data on 1st drive is "mirrored" on the 2nd drive. This gives you a complete, on-the-fly copy of all your data. In the even of a primary drive failure, the backup drive takes over and continues functioning with no loss of data and no immediate down time.
- RAID 6 (Double-Partity): RAID 6 offers excellent redundancy at a relatively low cost. RAID 6 requires a minimum of 4 drives and, theoretically, you can add an unlimited amount of additional drives to the array. Each additional drive represents additional storage and increased protection against data loss. RAID-6 controllers support hot-swapping of drives, allowing an admin to replace a defective drive without any downtime or data loss.
