Start with the Destination
Let's say your company or agency is thinking of an infrastructure upgrade. Every department and application will want money and a say. Where does one start? It starts with backups. I know this sounds counterintuitive and really no one thinks about backups until they need a restore. But here it is: the best thing you can do for your infrastructure is start with backups. Assuming you have a centralized backup system it is the perfect place to start. Note, if you don't have centralized backups please read our article as to why you should. A centralized backup strategy reaches out to touch everything in your environment. It provides you with a view of all the data you have, where it's headed and what's really important. Not to mention the practical aspects, like properly planning the backups to fit in an after-hour's backup window ensuring that Applications and End-users have bandwidth during business hours.
Details Matter
Modern backups with short retentions now go to disk eliminating the need for tape and tape management. This directs us to new and more cost-effective storage arrays, that now, with increased bandwidth from the network, ensure application and user data sets. This also creates the opportunity for companies to use or build their own clouds further reducing costs, and furthering end user productivity.
Backup agents and options and new advancements in backup technology can improve backups for enterprise applications such as Exchange, SQL or Oracle. Intelligent policies provide backup consistency, while allowing application owners to focus on administration, and not backups or the maintenance of the backup storage space. I.E. clean-up of old backups.
Your Next Step
There is certainly more to the idea of Infrastructure Design from a backup perspective. The Zurka Design Integration team will help you with a health check of the backup environment, make recommendations, design an appropriate solution, implement it, and train your team.