Disk-Based Backup Appliances GO HEAD-TO HEAD

摘要

Any IT pro who has designed a backup scheme knows that backup is complicated. You need to consider issues such as incremental versus differential backup, retention periods, backup windows, and point-in-time recovery, among many others. Of course, backup involves not just copying data but also restoring it, and restoring from tape can be difficult and error-prone. Backup ought to be simpler, especially for small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) that have limited IT resources. In the wake of Microsoft's recent release of Windows Storage Server and the advent of Serial ATA (SATA) disks, I anticipated seeing disk-based backup innovations to simplify backup and restore and finding good deals on backup appliances for SMBs. I found four backup-appliance solutions that include all the hardware and software necessary to back up Windows servers to disk. (For a list of additional vendors of backup-appliance products, see the sidebar "More Backup-Appliance Vendors.") Each vendor also offers optional tape backup or replication for offsite storage, open-file support, and agents to enable backup of Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server data.