New technology increases the power of disk to support backup, data retention, and disaster recovery planning, while delivering the performance that has long been a key differentiator of disk-based solutions.

The challenge is finding a solution that gives you the speed advantage of disk and the long term retention qualities of tape - and you don't want to deal with the hassles of integrating multiple components yourself.

Choosing the most appropriate disk-based backup solution is a critical task for the simple reason that there are numerous, varying options available. As a guide, users should ask vendors the following;

• How is the product managed?
   
• Is there a remote management facility?
   
• Is the management software included in the price of the product?
   
• Are the components (hardware, software) of the solution fully integrated?
   
• What is the licensing model for the product?
   
• Which operating systems are supported?
   
• Is data backed up on a volume or file level, or both?
   
• What email databases are supported, if any? Are specific agents available for applications such as Microsoft Exchange? How much do they cost?
   
• What is the minimum and maximum capacity of the system? Can you easily upgrade to larger capacities? What RAID levels are supported?
   
• How long does it take to install the product?
   
• What is the throughput of the system?
   
• How many backups, and how many versions of backups, can the configuration support?
   
• When restore is required how granular is the restore process? Can data be restored to a specific date-in-time or is a full restore required?
   
• Is compression supported to reduce capacity requirements?
   
• Can the disk drives be removed for offsite storage?
   
• Can the solution perform a bare metal restore?
   

For small and medium size businesses, migrating from tape technology to disk-based solutions is easier than you may think. Start with Discovery

• Understand your areas of frustration and how your ideal solution would behave.
   
• Create a design plan showing your current network infrastructure with the existing backup solution.
   
• Modify the plan to show how a disk-based backup solution would be implemented

• Research the market place to find the product with the features you need while also discovering new features previously unknown to you. Use webinars and online documentation to understand how the product will be used.
   
• Evaluate the products that best fit your situation.
   
• Create cost comparisons, keeping in mind today's needs and future growth requirements.
   
• Find a company willing to review your plans and assist in optimizing your migration to a tape-free network.
   

• Read the technical documentation and ask questions when ever possible.
   
• Document the migration process.
   
• Document an archiving process for offsite storage.
   
• Make the switch and enjoy a good night's rest knowing you have the best data protection solution available.
   

The core competencies of SANAT data protection solutions are tailored for the small and medium business (SMB) market. SANAT Disk2Disk backup solution integrates seamlessly into existing networks and contains the features that SMBs are looking in a comprehensive data protection solution.

The benefits of SANAT products start immediately by removing price and performance barriers, thereby enabling IT managers to deploy a tiered storage approach for optimum data protection. The combination of backup and recovery into a single appliance gives organizations of all sizes a highly effective Disk2Disk strategy.

Some of the most critical features provided by this backup / recovery solution are:

• An innovative pooling mechanism for minimizing disk storage and I/O. Same files in multiple backups either from a single PC or different PC's are stored only once. This result in substantial reduction in the amount of disk storage required for the backup data as well as reduces the disk writes thereby saving a lot of time.
   
• The backed up data gets compressed before storing. This ensures that the disk space taken for the backed up data is minimal without compromising the integrity of the data availability. The normal CPU cycles that is associated with the compression is further reduced since only new files that are already not there in the storage pool needs to be compressed and not the complete backed up data. On an average, the storage space required for storing the highly compressible data gets reduced by approximately 40%.
   
• The Web interface that is used for starting up backup or restore processes is a very powerful CGI user interface that allows administrators to view log files and restore files like a breeze..
   
• There is no client side software required for this to work. The complete software gets installed on the server side with no agents required to be installed on the client side. This saves enormous amount of time in installing various agents on the possible multiple clients that might exist in your production network.
   
• There are highly flexible configuration parameters that are available to schedule multiple backups at the same time, specific file types to be excluded from the backup, directory locations to backup or exclude. There are various powerful parameters that are available to be specified and applicable to the whole network. There are some parameters that are specific to each node in the network as well.
   
• This backup module supports mobile environments where notebooks are connected sparingly in the network.
   
• The restore options that can be specified are very powerful. Single files can be downloaded from a specified backup to the direct location through the CGI interface. Alternatively, zip or tar files of the files to be restored also to the specified location through the CGI interface.