Back up or pack up

After looking at cost and reliability issues with vendors such as IBM and Acer, Crighton concluded the pricing structure was exorbitant and reliability was key.

He said in the end he chose to implement a network-attached storage (NAS) device from Netgear, through reseller Instant IT.

Andrew Crawford-Flett, business development manager at Instant IT, said to a large degree the customer had done the hard yards in ascertaining how things needed to change.

“He had a tape and aging back-up server which was running out of room and expanding quickly with the site across road on a WAN connection,” Crawford-Flett said.

“We had to look at back up for one solution and this window was too long and required too much management. What was really needed was to reduce man hours for disaster recovery.

“In order to cater for high availability of data and reduced or eliminated backup, with a small recovery window in event of any failures, we suggested a NAS-ready system to provide a synchronous solution for all needs of the network backups happening concurrently,” he said.

Crawford-Flett said key to the solution was affordability, but without being in any way inferior.

“The Netgear NAS system allows for minimal management and is based on RAID technology which automates as you go and expands with more disks,” he said.

The Netgear ReadyNAS device uses the more robust SATA disks – removable hard drives to store and back up business information.

“This is great for customers – it is so easy to implement and can be up and running in few hours. Basically it is a plug-and-pay NAS solution,” he said.

Crawford-Flett said an aspect of great importance to the system is redundancy.

“Richard is using the Netgear ReadyNAS appliance to automate back up of critical data and reservations are not lost, and business disruption is minimised.

“With two hotels they actually have three Netgear NAS systems which are automated at each site, all replicating each other.

“This reduces the need for offsite back-up because if there is data failure at one site, the availability of the WAN allows for instant recovery.”

According to Crawford-Flett, Crighton thoroughly researched NAS appliances that can automatically back up and replicate data quickly, recognise a variety of different clients, alert the administrator of problems occurring during back-up, facilitate quick and simple re-build of PCs from stored images and rely on SATA disks.

He found that SATA drives offer improved capabilities over tape back-up systems and can be hot-swapped, when swapping disks for larger capacity drives.

Users do not have to turn off the power of the NAS first; and the system can be expanded as the business grows when users can replace small-capacity SATA disks with larger capacity disks.

He said it is inexpensive to implement, very easy to install and supports mirroring of data, so if one SATA disk fails, data is not lost; and does not degrade like tape.

Netgear’s ReadyNAS systems, which are available in box-like formation and rackmount design, have slots for two or four SATA drives and provide 500 and 750 gigabits or one, 1.5, two, three and four terabytes of storage.

ReadyNAS met Crighton’s criteria through its RAID technology, which allows multiple individual hard disks to be combined to perform as if they were one larger disk.

The effect is to spread and replicate the data across the multiple disks (providing data redundancy). That, in turn, reduces the risk of losing data if one drive fails.

“I looked at several scenarios and the amount of mission critical data that needed to be stored, and decided to go with an appliance that was based on RAID technology, for peace of mind,” said Crighton.

Depending on how the disks are configured, RAID can provide a good level of data protection through redundancy. If a single disk fails, all data will remain intact and accessible, and IT administrators are able to purchase a replacement drive. No single-drive solution offers data redundancy, so when the drive fails, all data is lost. In that case, the only option is to find a firm that specialises in data recovery and there is no guarantee that all of the data will be recovered. Data recovery costs can also be very large.

Crighton purchased two ReadyNAS 1100 Rackmount Network Storage devices with three terabytes of capacity, and installed one at each hotel.

He uses a VPN (a secure link via the Internet between two computer networks) connection between the two hotels to remove back-ups of data from each site, supporting business continuity practices.

He said the ReadyNAS appliances are so feature-packed that he is only using a fraction of its capabilities.

Crawford-Flett supplied the ReadyNAS Rackmount units and has several more customers that have also deployed ReadyNAS devices.

“Small-to-medium-sized businesses can plan a complete business continuity solution around ReadyNAS equipment,” Crawford-Flett said.

“ReadyNAS suits SMBs because of its ease of deployment and management, data redundancy features and price-point. Netgear also has a well-established name in the market which reassures an SMB the equipment will be robust.”

Crighton said that the installation of the devices and dealing with Instant IT was easy and cost competitive.

“I was amazed how easy it was to install the ReadyNAS Rackmount devices – they are basically plug and play,” he said. “I’m not a big manuals person, so was impressed with the user interface – it was just magic.

“Accessing data stored on the ReadyNAS is also very simple. It only takes a couple of seconds to transfer information from the ReadyNAS to a PC, as opposed to tape which took minutes to retrieve. I’ve also been impressed with how easy it is use the ReadyNAS as an archive platform.

With a disk, if a particular file fails to back up, for instance, I’m alerted straight away and can investigate and fix the issue, then re-run the back-up,” Crighton said.

“Just recently we had a very small failure with tape – luckily though, the ReadyNAS also stored a copy of the information that was needed.

In the future, Crighton plans to further use the VPN to connect the servers at each site and facilitate information sharing between the hotels.
“I understand they are going to implement a fourth NAS soon, which will give even greater redundancy across four devices and different locations,” Crawford-Flett said.