Top 10 Reasons to Deploy WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery

 

Short of a world-ending Eschaton epidemic of earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods like that coming in 2012, most data protection is simple: take everything and copy it somewhere far enough away so that you’ll have it when you need it — in an emergency. The challenge is how to do this in the most efficient and reliable way.

 

Un-optimized wide area network-based approaches to data backup are naturally limited by the performance of the WAN (wide area network). Bandwidth limitations and network latency can make backup take much longer than desired. For large remote offices with significant datastores, this can make WAN-based backup impossible without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades. Deploying WAN optimization solutions can help you protect more, recover faster, reduce risk and save money.

 

Below we provide 10 reasons to deploy WAN optimization for disaster recovery

 

10. Eliminate Backup in Branches. By effectively leveraging the wide area network for backup or replication of data in branch offices, you can save on the hardware, software, and administrative costs of local backup, tape duplication, and manual offsite transportation of tapes.

 

9. Reduce Costs. Data streamlining deduplicates WAN traffic, reducing disaster recovery bandwidth requirements by up to 95%, cutting your network costs significantly. Also the elimination of branch backup brings massive savings for every office.

 

8. Reduce Administrative Overhead. Using the WAN as your data transport mechanism instead of tapes provides automated, reliable DR operations. No more time wasted in the shuffling of tapes by IT staff (or non-IT staff for that matter!).

 

7. Reduce Security Risk. Eliminating tape transport and encrypting WAN traffic, coupled with centralized storage and role-based administration, makes passing industry and government regulatory audits much, much easier. No headline news about loss of your confidential information.

 

6. Protect More Data. By accelerating replication and backup up to 45x faster across the WAN, you can now cover not just mission-critical data, but ALL the data across your enterprise, while easily making your backup windows. This includes mobile workers laptops too.

 

5. Protect More Often. Faster DR on the WAN also translates into great improvements in your recovery point objective (RPO), reducing the amount of time and data that could have been lost since your last backup.

 

4. Recover Faster. Restore data across the WAN instantly instead of waiting for backup tapes to be found and delivered for an improved recovery time objective (RTO). Or better yet, have all your data staged and ready to go in your remote DR site. Even improve business continuity by having employees working productively from remote or temporary locations after a site disaster.

 

3. Centralize Storage or Move it to the Cloud. Whether you choose public or private cloud storage, enjoy the resilience and economies of scale for reduced costs and fast access from anywhere.

 

2. Make the Most of Your Storage Investment. Get more from your current storage hardware and software, and have the confidence of knowing that the solutions have been qualified and certified for use with Riverbed.

 

1. Have Your DR operations Play Nice with Your Business Apps. Use powerful quality of service (QoS) capabilities to match your priorities, whether you want replication to take precedence over other WAN traffic or vice versa, never slow things down.

 

To find out more about the benefits of how Riverbed WAN optimization solutions benefits DR, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/results/solutions/centralize_replicate/.