Archives : 2011 : July
SMB and SOHO Data Storage and RDX Storage Technology
Driven both by corporate business needs and government regulations, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) today face the challenge of safely storing and protecting their corporate data—whether those assets are in the form of data, images, video or audio. RDX Storage Technology meets and exceeds these requirements.
Did you know that:
• A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds
• 2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day
• 32% of data loss is caused by human error
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their PC files to events beyond their control
• 25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive
• 44% of data loss is caused by mechanical failures
• 15% or more of laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures
• One in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during its lifetime
(University of North Carolina Technology Survey)
The quantity of the information SMBs generate and consume daily is estimated to be growing at an alarming rate of 60% annually. Just like their larger counterparts, SMBs must manage and safeguard this data and other physical records or face business disruption, devastating losses or potential failure of the business itself. SMBs storage needs are similar to those of large corporations, but the fact is that the storage solutions must be completely different. The key component of an effective data storage solution can enable SMBs to simultaneously establish practical and highly effective backup and archival practices.
A Convergence of Factors
The backup and storage capacity requirements have been fueled by a convergence of factors: companies today require 24×7 access to increasingly large amounts of data; compliance regulations now extend the retention periods for documents and data; and companies have gained a growing awareness of the need to back up their data as part of an overall business continuity or disaster recovery plan.
Instant access to data is now taken for granted, whether in the office, on the road or working remotely. This has become a business imperative as unmanaged or poorly managed data can bury decisions under even higher piles of conflicting data. This can also cause companies to waste time looking for information, reducing overall productivity and leading to missed opportunities to grow the business, from losing individual sales to losing customers.
At the same time, the expanding body of state and federal government legislation and compliance requirements now mandate how and when certain types of information may be used, stored, retained and destroyed. In addition, certain industries have regulations mandating how information must be stored and made available, and the Internet has produced a growing body of privacy laws.
Properly managed, data is a strategic corporate asset. Improperly managed, it can become a significant liability. In the case of a litigation request, for example, companies are responsible for producing the required information that is needed for its defense. Company executives have the responsibility of producing the right records at the right time.
Therefore, companies have a growing awareness of the necessity of disaster recovery programs that include the regular backup and archiving of data so that in the event of a natural disaster (fire, water damage, etc.) they can quickly access another copy of their corporate data and be back up and running again quickly.
However, while companies may recognize the value of their data and the negative impact of data loss on their businesses, many are still not adequately protecting their data. According to Small Business Computing magazine, 40% of SMBs don’t back up their data at all, and 60% of all data is stored on PC desktops and laptops. Looking at SOHO users, only 73% who have a personal backup device back up at least monthly, and only 40% back up daily. This failure to protect data adequately can have dire consequences. Disasters aren’t always extreme—an extended power outage can devastate a small business just as a major earthquake or flood. Personal disasters are even more likely, according to the following statistics from research at the University of North Carolina’s Information Technology Service:
40% of SMBs don’t backup their data at all, and 60% of all data is stored on PC desktops and laptops.
SMB Storage Gets Personal
Today’s Dynamic: Technology Evolves To Keep Pace with Storage Requirements
The good news is that the right storage devices, such as RDX Storage Technology, can help SMBs share data, collaborate in an automated way and protect their valuable assets. In addition to avoiding wasted time and improved collaboration, SMBs can move more quickly and arrive at key decisions more efficiently if they manage, backup and intelligently migrate data on an ongoing basis.
Unlike large enterprises; smaller companies usually have a systems administrator that will handle storage as an added task rather than a dedicated storage expert, necessitating that data protection be simple to understand, implement and administer.
SMBs require an easy to use, simple to integrate, fool-proof and cost-effective “all in one” storage solution. The key features that appeal to SMBs in any external storage device are capacity and throughput, with portability and an external button to start their backup as other key features. RDX Stoarge technology meets these.
Establishing Personal Storage Best Practices
There are numerous laws, regulations, standards and business practices that include data retention requirements. SMBs must comply with the record keeping requirements defined by regulators, their industry and by legal precedence. The retention requirements vary significantly from one type of data to another and the same data may be required to be kept for different time periods by different states.
SMB Storage Gets Personal - Today, RDX Storage Technology solves these problems for SMBs and SOHO.
Ultimately, by instituting a records management and storage process:
• Storage becomes highly reliable and error-free
• Archived assets are easy to preserve, locate, reuse and resell
• Archival storage becomes the standard, rather than a luxury
• Disaster recovery best practices can be instituted
Summing it Up
RDX Removable Hard Disk Storage System makes your data backup easier, faster, more reliable and more secure. It uses a rugged, removable disk cartridge and docking station that backs up just like a tape drive. Yet its speed makes it a smart replacement to 8mm, VXA and DLT performance tapes. In fact, the RDX Storage System is able to back up more than 125GB of data per hour and allows you to access files instantly. Cartridge capacities range from 160GB to 1TB, making storage options extremely flexible. And you’ll never run out of storage space, simply add more removable cartridges as your data needs expand.
The growth of corporate digital assets and issues such as compliance and disaster recovery have expanded small- to medium-sized business storage requirements. Feature for feature, the RDX Removable Hard Disk Storage System is a reliable, flexible and expandable solution designed to meet these growing data protection needs. Combining the removability and high capacity of tape with the random file access and performance of disk, RDX provides a compelling answer to the onsite/offsite data protection needs of small businesses and branch offices.
RDX Cost Effectively Matches and Surpasses Tape
Attempts to replace tape with various technologies have always failed because they could not match or surpass tape in its removal, capacity, archival or low-cost benefits that users demand. The industry has therefore been searching for and exploring technologies that both complement and address low-end tape’s biggest detractors; its relatively low performance during both backup and retrieval operations, and its relatively high failure rates when compared to disk.
RDX technology successfully and cost-effectively matches and surpasses tape in all of its key aspects AND provides the backup and retrieval performance of random access disk with 99.999% reliability. The RDX technology solution is the only viable removable backup technology for high-capacity desktops and low-end servers.
RDX technology is a removable hard disk drive system that handles and operates like traditional tape drives and media, yet has all of the advantages of disk-to-disk (D2D) systems. The RDX technology device allows for backups to be accomplished in the traditional fashion of working just like tape – moving data directly to a device with removable media. To the computer, the RDX cartridge looks just like a tape cartridge. However, backup performance and reliability are distinctly different.
It takes RDX technology less than half an hour to back up 80 GB of native data at its 45 MB per second transfer rate. For this same operation in the tape world, a DLT V4 drive takes over two hours, a DAT160 drive takes almost four hours, and a DAT72 drive requires over seven hours. And on a restore, RDX technology media has all of the read/write advantages of a hard disk drive. What also takes hours of serialized search in the low-end tape world, takes milliseconds with the RDX technology drive. In brief, a RDX technology backup lets you vastly improve customer response times by allowing you to recover customer files in minutes instead of hours.
Removability and Portability
The 3.5-inch form factor RDX technology drive system utilizes a unique removable media that is ruggedly designed for portability. RDX technology media consists of a mobile 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) suspended in a highly durable cartridge. The same 2.5-inch drives are most often used in laptop computers due to their size and locking head feature. With its protective, shock-proof cartridge design, the RDX technology cartridge passes drop tests in excess of one meter onto a tiled concrete floor without damage.
Before the arrival of RDX technology, users had to choose between tape, disk, or a combination of both to back up their high-end desktops and low-end servers—each with architecture, performance, and cost issues. Now there is a viable alternative— RDX Technology. RDX is the only backup technology that offers the best of both worlds: tape (removability, affordability, archivability) and disk (higher performance, simplicity, reliability) — all in one cost-effective package.
