Traditional methods of protecting data often don't work in today's demanding IT environments, so users are looking for new methods for backup and recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity. Read this InfoStor editorial guide, sponsored by CA ARCserve, for an in-depth look at how to safely embark on new data protection strategies, from options for disk-based backup and recovery, to why you need DR management, the role of dedupe in DR and why managing tape is no longer an oxymoron.

Recovery is something for which all businesses must prepare. Most acknowledge the need for comprehensive business continuity plans, but the expense and complexity of fully implementing these plans leads many enterprises to only partially implement them. Business continuity plans generally cover information technology (IT) infrastructure (applications and data), communications, people, and process recovery. This white paper discusses a cost-effective approach to providing IT infrastructure recovery solutions to meet remote (disaster recovery) and local (backup) requirements.

When choosing a server virtualization application, such as backup and recovery, it's important to understand the advantages -- and limitations – of the various options. For data protection of virtual servers, IT managers and storage administrators need a software-based solution that supports transparent backup, disaster recovery (DR) from catastrophic failures within minutes, and automated application failover/failback for faster, more reliable restoration of application services – all from a single recovery platform, with a centralized management GUI, that covers physical and virtual machine environments (including VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft), heterogeneous servers (Windows, Linux, and Unix), and all storage platforms and applications.
Download this white paper to learn more about data protection and recovery for virtual servers.

File data growth and economic pressures are driving rapid adoption of data reduction technologies. Read this report for the results of tests that validate the performance of Storwize's real-time data compression solution. Included are details of how it delivers the key requirements for primary storage data reduction, including:

• increased data compression and throughput

• improved storage utilization and reclamation, and

• transparent NAS application integration and high availability.

Server virtualization has become one of the most vital technologies in IT departments today because it reduces operational and capital expenditure through consolidation, rapid server deployment and cost-effective disaster recovery. However, for many organizations server migration takes too long, is too difficult, and backup impact limits virtual machine density. Read this paper to learn what a survey of users showed about the true impact of virtualization migrations on their organizations, and how automating backup can simplify and shorten the migration process. Benefits such as reduced system downtime and greater staff efficiency are outlined.

This paper examines the ramifications of server virtualization for storage management, taking an in-depth look at how evolving server virtualization approaches either integrate with or attempt to encapsulate the enterprise storage infrastructure. Depending on the approach, server virtualization solutions can either limit access to or profitably leverage existing networked storage tools, expertise, and processes. The paper also provides an overview of Citrix StorageLink, a solution that leverages and multiplies the value of server virtualization with existing investment in networked storage

Two growing consolidation trends, virtualization and deduplication, are converging in data centers due mainly to inefficiencies in the traditional backup and restore model. If data protection were inherently efficient, today’s rigorous and sometimes frantic demand for data reduction on the secondary side, and the backup contention menace that unbalances so many virtualization experiences on the primary side, could be eliminated. Read this paper to learn why managing data protection more efficiently is fundamental to data center efficiency and future data center growth, and how it addresses server sprawl challenges, adds performance enhancements, reduces hardware costs, and improves protection and administrative ease-of-use.

As organizations struggle with storing the ever-growing volumes of data, they have additional pressure to address high performance service level agreements while securing and protecting data to maintain business continuity.  In this white paper, Sylvatica Consulting discusses best practices to balance the evolving roles of disk and tape as part of a comprehensive tiered strategy to address these complex needs for backup and long term retention.

A recent IDC study reveals that despite a shrinking economy at the end of 2008, the amount of data generated was 487 billion gigabytes, and the "Digital Universe" is expected to double in size every 18 months, resulting in a 5-fold increase in data over the next four years. For many organizations, this data is being stored on tape systems that represent a significant investment but offer decreasing visibility as data volumes grow. Read this paper to learn about a proactive tape storage management approach that automatically monitors tape library, tape drive and media performance, and provides real-time alerting and reporting capabilities. It describes a vendor-agnostic, platform-neutral, comprehensive assessment for tape storage systems that features recommendations to maximize existing resources, avoid unnecessary expenditures and ensure compliance requirements are met.