The Problem

Deni Connor, Principal Analyst at Storage Strategies NOW (www.ssg-now.com) has just published a Snapshot Report on accelerated WAN-based backup and disaster recovery. In the report, Deni points out that successfully executing backup and disaster recovery across a WAN can be a daunting exercise, fraught with obstacles and problems including:

• Latency
• Low Bandwidth
• Network Contention
• Out of Order Packets
• Packet loss

All of these potential issues can affect an organizations ability to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) when performing WAN-based backup and disaster recovery.

The Approach

Deni identifies the approach to managing these WAN backup and disaster recovery potholes as application acceleration. She illustrates and defines how organizations can use application acceleration to improve backup, data deduplication, replication and mirroring by as much as 95% and bandwidth cost by 60% using the following technologies:

• Compression
• Quality of Service (QoS)
• TCP Optimization
• Traffic Shaping and Prioritization

The Options

Deni highlights two options to address Wan-based backup and disaster recovery:

• Hardware-based appliances
• Software-based virtual appliances

According to the report, hardware-based appliances add to the data center footprint, consume additional and expensive energy and require increased network bandwidth and additional management interfaces. While software-based virtual appliances, installed as virtual machines, leverage existing server resources and require no additional power or expensive floor space.

The Verdict

Deni highlights a number of value points that detail the benefits of choosing a virtual acceleration appliance solution over a hardware-based solution for WAN-based backup and disaster recovery. She specifically states that using virtual acceleration appliances, customers can:

• Reduce the costs of their WAN circuits
• Manage backup operations from the remote office better
• Recover data faster
• Reduce delays and improve WAN performance

We’ve highlighted some of the findings of the report above. We’d encourage you to read the full report here.