• Complexity
• Cost
• Difficulty in getting management buy-in
• Insufficient vendor support should a disaster strike
• Time consuming to properly implement and manage

1.    All-in-One Backup and Recovery.  SMBs lack the time and expertise required to purchase and then assemble and configure the hardware and software needed just to deliver on a backup solution, much less a viable DR solution.  What they need is a solution that provides them with all of the components they need to quickly move from installation and deployment to operations.

This "all-in-one" backup and recovery solution needs to meet this definition in every respect. It first needs to be available as an appliance with the hardware and backup software preconfigured and integrated to work as one.

The backup software then needs to protect and recover both physical and virtual operating systems. It also should integrate with existing applications to provide recoverable data. Finally, the solution should manage all features from a single, consolidated console to reduce the time required to manage it.

2.    Disk-based Backup with Deduplication and Byte-Level Replication. Backup to disk and deduplication have become almost the de facto standards for delivering fast, efficient backups and recoveries. Disk facilitates the fast backup and recovery of data and applications while deduplication minimizes data stored so disk can be cost-effectively used in this role for storing backup data.

Deduplication also serves an important role in making offsite data replication possible. By first reducing data stores, deduplication minimizes the amount of data that needs to be sent over a WAN link.

Byte-level replication further contributes to minimizing WAN traffic by sending only the bytes within a file that have actually changed across the wire. While it is related to deduplication, even within a deduplicated block only some of the bytes may have changed. Using byte-level replication ensures that only those changed bytes are transferred.

3.    Multiple Data Replication Options. Replicating data over a WAN link sounds great but there are some practical realities that may preclude SMBs from accomplishing this objective. These include: no secondary site to use as a target; too much data to initially replicate over a WAN link to seed the secondary site; and too much data to retrieve over a WAN link to do a recovery. It is for these reasons that any all-in-one backup and recovery solution needs to offer multiple replication options.

Two specific options it minimally needs to include are options to replicate data to removable disk media or a disk archive and the option to replicate data over a WAN. Replicating data to a removable disk archive avoids the need to send inordinate amounts of data over a WAN link. In this way a remote site may be initially seeded using data on the disk archive or conversely, if a recovery needs to occur, the data may be first copied to a disk archive and then taken to the recovery site. A local disk archive also gives those SMBs without a secondary site the option to replicate data to this disk archive and then physically move it offsite as they have in the past.

However most SMBs are looking to minimize their handling of any type of media (disk or tape) which is why using software to periodically replicate changed data over a WAN link is needed. This keeps the data at a remote site up-to-date while eliminating the need to regularly handle media.

4.    No Hidden Software Licensing Fees. One of the historical problems associated with implementing a viable DR solution is deciphering its software licensing costs. Complicating the situation, as SMBs look to implement DR they are likely doing it for the first time. As such, they may not even know what software features they need.

So regardless of the solution they select, the software licensing fees associated with doing the replication associated with DR need to be transparent and simple to understand. This simplicity in software licensing minimizes requests for additional funding to implement needed features. It also gives SMBs the freedom to implement the replication features that they need to execute on their DR initiatives.

5.    Vendor Support. This is an intangible that can be hard to measure until a disaster actually occurs. Clearly everyone wants, needs and expects their vendor to help them recover and provide the resources at the time they most need them.

So the level of support needed to perform a recovery will be heavily influenced by how well the solution's other features are implemented. However if the data has been successfully and consistently replicated, the ability of a vendor to actually support a recovery and provide the resources that are needed is greatly increased.

• Minimizes or eliminates the need to put agents on every VM. By integrating with the VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP), SMBs no longer need to put a Revinetix agent on every VM. Instead, they may use this new feature in Revinetix to track changes on each VM to do fast full or incremental VM backups by doing snapshots of the individual VMs.
• Automatically detects new VMs for backups. As new VMs are created, Revinetix now regularly queries either the VMware ESX/ESXi host or VMware vCenter for VMs in the environment. If a new VM is identified and is it not configured for backup, Revinetix will back it up using a default profile.
• Deduplicates data at a more granular level. In RevOS 4.0, Revinetix expands its deduplication technology beyond the file level by deduplicating data at a block level. This feature is essential to driving up storage efficiency as VMware backups typically have above average levels of redundant data when compared to physical environments. This should result in Revinetix Sentio disk backup appliances being able to achieve up to 20:1 or greater deduplication ratios and store up to five times as much data as when using Revinetix' file-based deduplication technology.

• Economical. On a cost per GB basis, tape used to have disk beat hands down, often by a factor of 10:1. But that gap had dropped precipitously in recent years, down to the point where the price per GB of removable disk is only 2 or 3x more expensive than tape for the same amount of capacity. However, removable disk may be more cost effective than tape. Even though their data is growing, SMEs typically only have hundreds of GBs of data to archive, not terabytes. Removable disk gives them the flexibility to buy disks that are smaller in capacity and matches their specific storage requirements which can make it more affordable than tape. Advantage: Disk.
• Power and space efficient. Using tape to store data offline is both power and space efficient as a tape cartridge uses no electricity and consumes only minimal space. However, removable disk now has these same properties since it does not need to be powered on all of the time.  Advantage: Draw.
• Portable. It used to be that tape was just about the only option for SMEs to use to move large amounts of data for offsite protection and disaster recovery. However, removable disk provides this same flexibility and actually one-ups tape. Archived data may either first need to be restored from tape to disk in order to retrieve it or it can take a long time to access the archived data on tape. Using removable disk, data retrieval is almost as fast as if it were on production storage. Advantage: Disk.
• Durability. Drop it. Kick it. Move it. Write to it. Read to it. Today's tape cartridges take a licking and keep on ticking. Except that today's removable disk cartridges (RDX media specifically) has the same properties and even best tape when it comes to the total number of reads and writes. Advantage: Disk.
• Infinite capacity.  If a tape cartridge fills up, no problem. Just insert a new blank one in its place. Except that with removable disk you can now do the same thing so tape can no longer exclusively claim this feature. Advantage: Draw.

• Removable disk drive. Administrators can configure Revinetix to copy backups to any external hard disk drive (HDD) that is connected to the Revinetix solution via a USB port. Once copied to the HDD, the drive can then be moved and stored offsite. Users who will want to take advantage of this feature are those that have no secondary site, need an affordable disaster recovery plan, want media they can re-use for years (the same disk drive can likely be re-used for 5 - 10 years, assuming it has sufficient capacity) and it is easy to setup and do.

• Replication. Replication is the other D2D2D option that Revinetix offers. This is intended for those users that have a secondary remote site and a WAN link. They can then configure Revinetix to replicate backup data to this secondary site thereby eliminating the overhead with manually handling HDDs and transporting them offsite.  When a disaster strikes, data recovery is as easy as enabling the Revinetix D2D2D appliance at the secondary site to become the primary appliance with immediate access to business critical data.

• Hard disk drive (HDD) capacities and cost. HDD manufacturers have delivered on forecasted but still hard to believe increases in storage capacities over the last 10 years. In that time, the size of SATA HDDs have increased from about 40 GBs to their present size of 2 TBs, essentially doubling in storage capacity about every 18 months. Further, the price for the physical platter has essentially stayed the same or even dropped over that same period of time such that a 2 TB internal HDD can be obtained for around $100.  Conversely, a 1.5 TB LTO-5 tape cartridge now costs as much or more than disk while offering less raw capacity.

• Data deduplication. A few years ago, data deduplication was THE breakthrough technology that first enabled disk to begin to replace tape as a primary backup target. Now, data deduplication just makes disk that much more affordable than tape, plus it gives disk-based backup a tape-like property: that of "infinite capacity."

One of the few remaining arguments for tape is that a tape library will technically never "run out of capacity" because as soon as a tape cartridge fills up it can be replaced with another tape cartridge. However, since up to 97% of the backup data in most businesses is a deduplicate of the data from the previous day's, week's and month's backup, by deduplicating it businesses essentially get this property of tape when they use a disk solution that deduplicates data.

Affordable software versions of data deduplication are now readily available from providers such as Revinetix that can achieve deduplication ratios of 4x or greater. For example, using Revinetix's data deduplication in conjunction with fifteen (15) internal 2 TB HDDs, SMEs can achieve effective backup storage capacities of over 100 TBs which, from their perspective and at this stage of the game, meets their definition of "infinite capacity."

• Replication. Disk's immobility was another long term road block to the disk's broader adoption. After all, what good is a backup on disk if your building with all of your data in it is destroyed? But this hurdle too has been overcome in the last few years in large part because of data deduplication.

By deduplicating backup data before it is replicated, the only data that needs to be replicated offsite is the net new data. So once the initial full copy of all of a company's backup data is replicated offsite, only changes to that data need to be replicated going forward.

Further, since data deduplication is done before any data is replicated, only one copy of all new data is then transmitted to the secondary site. This minimizes the size/bandwidth of the WAN connection that SMEs need to replicate the data and they may even be able to use an existing WAN connection to perform this task.

• Improvements in backup software technology and licensing. Even with these prior three factors in place, if backup software could not backup or recover from disk, manage backup data once it is on disk, or only did so at a price that was cost-prohibitive to most SMEs, it would still be premature to declare that disk had replaced tape as a primary backup target.

This is not the case as backup software from providers such as Revinetix Sentio illustrate. It backs up and recovers from disk.  It can manage the replication of backup data between two sites. All of its backup, data deduplication, recovery and replication features (along with many others) are included as part of its capacity based licensing model that SMEs find predictable and easy to understand.

• Less risk and pain in their environment
• Guarantees that what they have works
• The time to focus on initiatives that add more value to the business

• Target deduplication
• Source deduplication
• Hybrid deduplication
• Standalone target deduplication
• Integrated target deduplication
• Standalone source deduplication
• Integrated source deduplication

• Reduce their backup and recovery windows
• Ensure their backups successfully complete at or near 100% of the time
• Implement an offsite replication and recovery plan
• Minimize their upfront and ongoing costs associated with a deduplication solution

• The "large enterprise" deduplication approach may not be needed for backup data deduplication in SMEs. The deduplication technique used by large enterprises can arguably achieve deduplication ratios of up to 15x or greater. However, most disk-based deduplication solutions come with support for at least 15 hard disk drives, each with 2 TBs of raw storage capacity, so even a "small" disk-based backup solution has 30 TBs of raw storage capacity. So when you multiply 30 TBs by a deduplication factor of 15x you get a result of 450 TBs or more of logical capacity.

That's impressive! But how many SMEs really need 450 TBs or more of logical capacity? If you are only backing up a few hundred GBs every night and 1-2 TBs on the weekend, that is likely overkill. Granted, 30 TBs of raw capacity may not be quite enough, but there are solutions like the Revinetix Sentio that use alternative deduplication methods that enable users to easily achieve deduplication factors of 4x and reach 100 TBs or more of logical storage capacity, which is more than enough for their needs. Further, disk drives are only getting larger so a deduplication ratio of 4x could easily deliver 180 or 240 TBs of logical capacity in just a couple of years.

Now the counter argument to that is why should an SME settle for an alternative deduplication method when this other approach achieves higher deduplication ratios?  This is when the cost of the solution comes into play. You are likely going to pay for 15 drives regardless of which solution you buy. So if you only need say 60 TBs of logical capacity and the Revinetix Sentio delivers that while costing less, why pay for "large enterprise" deduplication technology when you don't need it?

• The "large enterprise" approach is likely needed for replication.  Most SMEs are looking to minimize or even eliminate tape in their disaster recovery environment but that is only possible if they replicate data offsite. This is why Revinetix replicates data at the byte level. This approach minimizes the amount of data sent over WAN connections so SMEs can ideally keep their existing WAN connections.

Granted, byte-level replication is more resource intensive so the possibility exists in some solutions that data replication may and probably will spill over into production hours. However, replicating data offsite tends not to be as time sensitive as backup so if this does occur, no one will notice or care.  Revinetix solves this problem by allowing SMEs to schedule their replication times outside normal business hours.

• A local disk-based backup target. Disk-based backup is documented to be 70% or faster than backup to tape plus the use of a local backup target enables backups and restores to complete much faster than when sending data to the cloud. This becomes pertinent when backing up the desktops and laptops of those individuals with large amounts of data.
• Data deduplication. Even though these desktops and laptops may contain a lot of data, the data itself may not change much or at all from backup job to backup job. By deduplicating all of the incoming backup data, the Revinetix Sentio keeps data stores to a minimum and eliminates the need for SMEs to continually to buy more storage to keep their backup data.

• Backup software
• Capacity based licensing that includes all backup software features
• Agents to protect applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server
• Disk-based target
• An unlimited number of backup agents
• Replication software

1. Make it easy to implement
2. Keep it easy to manage
3. Stop my backup pain
4. Don't blow my budget

• Backup software.  SMEs often suffer from having a myriad of backup software products as well as applications that go unprotected for a lack of funds. The Revinetix Sentio comes with its own backup software, RevOS, that can be used on as many application servers and desktop clients as the SME may have without incurring additional cost. This allows SMEs to standardize on it and eliminate the licensing costs of other backup software products that they may own.
• Disk-based backup. If there is any one ingredient that has become a key to successfully completing backups and recoveries, it is the use of disk as the primary target for both backup and recovery. Revinetix Sentio natively supports disk with storage capacity on its models ranging from configurations with as little as 500 GB of storage to as high as 70 TBs.
• Microsoft application support. Sentio natively includes backup agents for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server as well as offers AD and Windows file server support.
• Deduplication. Storing data to disk only remains affordable and practical over time if data is deduplicated. The Sentio appliance includes this feature that is critical to disk-based backup.
• Replication. SMEs are tired of DR plans that entail moving tapes in the backseats of their cars. Storing backup data on disk opens the door for them to automatically replicate data offsite. Using Revinetix' byte-level replication, SMEs can replicate data to another offsite Revinetix appliance or, if they do not have a secondary site, copy data to an external hard drive or even a USB thumb drive.