10 Pillars Of Business Continuance

The Ten Pillars of Business Continuance

No longer a luxury for Fortune 1000 companies alone, business continuance is a business imperative for most organizations. Successful business continuance requires that data is reliably backed up and available. In addition, government regulations mandate specific levels of data backup and restoration, adding new requirements to corporate data availability. These conditions require that data administrators develop business continuance processes that are very fast and reliable while accommodating budget constraints, allowing for data growth, and minimizing complexity. The Pillar Axiom® is the system of choice for business continuance applications:

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Consolidation – Optimizing Your Infrastructure At the foundation of any business continuance strategy is an infrastructure that improves uptime and is easy to manage. Consolidating multiple applications and data tiers – including primary and backup storage – onto a single high-utilization/high-capacity Pillar Axiom storage system reduces complexity and saves time, effort, and education cost. Why buy and maintain multiple storage systems when one consolidated system can do it all?

Application-Aware Storage – Fulfilling the Demands of Your Services Differentiating between the service levels for your data and applications allows you to focus the right business continuance services based on data criticality, age, or other factors. Pillar’s unique Quality of Service (QoS) for storage allows you to automatically deliver performance on demand, aligning the resources in your system with the criticality of the data – all in a single storage system or networked solution.

Disk-to-Disk Backup – Closing the Backup Windows A solid backup plan is an important part of any business continuance strategy – but you must use a backup method that doesn’t create downtime or interrupt availability, yet is easy to implement and assures reliable restorations. With disk-to-disk backup using AxiomONE® File Replicator on the Pillar Axiom, your backup window will be nearly eliminated, and because disk access is non-sequential, your restorations will shrink from days to mere minutes.

Robust Performance – Keeping Continuance Processes Free of Bottlenecks Backups, restorations, and archive creation will quickly become a hindrance if they impact overall system performance. With individual RAID controllers for each incremental disk enclosure and up to four data movers (Slammers) in each Pillar Axiom system, your system can stick to business as usual while backups and other business continuance functions operate in the background – without creating a bottleneck.

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Manageability – Simplifying Complex Infrastructures Especially with today’s more stringent data-retention and pin-point retrieval requirements, the management of storage infrastructures can be a major undertaking. Pillar Axiom is designed to be easy to use. With its intuitive management user interface, you free up administrators to focus on more proactive or critical tasks while you reduce licensing and training costs.

Virtual Tape Library – Integrating Legacy Archives into Today’s System To minimize the impact on the existing backup infrastructure, administrators sometimes need to include legacy tape archives with their disk-based backup systems. Pillar partnered with a leading virtual tape library (VTL) vendor to make the Pillar Axiom configurable as a VTL. When combined with the affordability, scalability, performance, and multi-hosting benefits of the Axiom, this provides a compelling solution for end users with a large investment in their existing tape-based system.

Scalability & Availability – Infrastructure that Keeps Up with Your Business A huge benefit of the Pillar Axiom system is its ability to scale easily. Axiom allows you to scale both I/O bandwidth, performance and capacity in a predictable and simple manner. The architecture of the Pillar Axiom makes it easy to create solutions with 24/7 availability. The Pillar Axiom is designed with high availability in mind, so every part is redundant with no single point of failure. If required, Pillar can help further protect your systems using Continuous Data Protection or Continuous Data Replication to mirror environments across separate arrays locally, remotely or both.

Disaster Recovery – Relying on the Best So You’ll be Ready for the Worst Pillar Data Systems offers disaster recovery (DR) solutions that ensure rapid recovery from site failures while remaining cost-effective, highly scalable, and easy to deploy and manage. The Pillar Axiom is heterogeneous and supports SAN and NAS systems, so it can take the place of multiple DR assets both at the primary and remote sites, acting as a replication target for many different arrays. And with the scalability and flexibility of the Pillar Axiom, DR coverage can rapidly move beyond the protection of mission-critical data to include e-mail and file sharing. It can provide you with the growth potential you need to accommodate dynamic DR capacity needs.

Remote Data Protection – Managing Remote Data as if it is Local Central policy-based backups from all your offices gives you the control you need to ensure that appropriate data protection is in place. But relying on personnel in distant offices to set up equipment or initiate processes can reduce the reliability of including remote offices in your business continuance plans. Automated “lights-out” backups are performed reliably and consistently on the Pillar Axiom using AxiomONE File Replicator, with features such as WAN network bandwidth utilization and security and data integrity safeguards. This system transfers and guarantees a second copy of remote data in a central hub or data center – whether you have three offices, or three thousand.

Eco-Friendly – The World’s Most Efficient Storage System Consolidation onto high-utilization storage systems reduces the amount of physical hardware in a data center, resulting in lower power and cooling costs and producing a smaller carbon footprint. You can operate your data center cost effectively as well as ecologically because of superior utilization of the disk space, multi-tiering, and multi-protocol ability in conjunction with thin provisioning. Pillar Axiom has set the standard for green storage and is the world’s most efficient storage system.

Pillar Data Systems takes a sensible, customer-centric approach to networked storage. We started with a simple, yet powerful idea: Build a successful storage company by creating value that others had promised, but never produced. At Pillar, we’re delivering the most cost-effective, highly available networked storage solutions on the market. We build reliable, flexible solutions that, for the first time, seamlessly unite SAN with NAS and enable multiple tiers of storage on a single platform. In the end, we created an entirely new class of storage.

For more information, visit www.pillardata.com or call 877.252.3706 © 2008 Pillar Data Systems. All Rights Reserved. Pillar Data Systems, Pillar Axiom, AxiomONE and the Pillar logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pillar Data Systems. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Specifications are subject to change without notice. 10P-BC-0108