Data Backups
Information is the life blood of businesses. Large volumes of data are created, processed and stored on a daily basis from emails, letters to invoices etc.
Why is data backup important?
Backups are important for a number of reasons. The first is to restore systems to an operational state following a disaster (called disaster recovery). The second is to restore files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted. An additional factor is the need to adhere to various laws, business policies and procedures. This data is also a prime target for unauthorised parties such as hackers and criminal gangs; hence keeping it safe and secure is also critical.
Managing large volumes of data and backing it effectively is time consuming and also requires appropriate data storage infrastructure and available trained staff. MailSure has been successfully involved in this area for many years and thus has built up a wealth of invaluable expertise.
Depending on what your needs, we can:-
- Perform backups for specific data such as emails, databases, office documents etc.
- Create disk images of PC/servers to aid quick restoration.
- Restore backups in case of server corruption/rebuild.
- We can undertake this either remotely or on-site.
- Handle systems based on both Windows and Linux.
- Allow your staff access secure and reliable remote access to data backups.
- Produce statistical and management reports of data usage.
We would perform any backups either on your backup storage (if any) or on our in-house dedicated archiving system. These backups can also be securely put onto suitable portable storage media such as DVD/CD if required.
Storage Devices
Data archiving used to be mainly stored on tape drive cassettes. Nowadays popular alternatives are also used such as DVD/CD's (for low data volumes) as well Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID). Typically backup infrastructures would use very large racks or farms of RAID, tape drives etc. Normally, these storage farms would also have a mirror site in a different geographical location for extra safety. Access to them is normally strictly controlled. Such data storage farms can typically handle terabytes (1000's gigabytes) or Petabytes or (PB) where one petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or even more.
Below are examples of data storage usage of some well known organisations:-
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Bentonville, Arkansas contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004. However, this is expected, as of the first quarter of January 2008, to have reached somewhere in the region of 9 PB.
Microsoft
Microsoft stores on 900 servers a total of approximately 14 petabytes. These are mostly imagery for Microsoft's digital model planet, Virtual Earth.
Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.
As your organisation grows, the data volumes will also grow. It is thus important and sensible that suitable arrangements are planned ahead. MailSure can offer our expertise and facilities.