Network Visibility Can Help Avoid the IT Blame Game
Backup and recovery has always been a complex endeavor. But in the age of the cloud, it has only become more difficult to manage because of the need to manage a local instance of an appliance that is connected to a backend cloud service.
Zetta.net eliminated that requirement by allowing IT organizations to back up files to the cloud without requiring any local agent software to be installed. Now Zetta.net is applying that same capability to entire software images.
Chris Schin, vice president of products for Zetta.net, says version 4.5 of the DataProtect from Zetta.net provides backup and recovery using an agentless approach that makes it possible to directly back up and recover both images and files into and out of the Zetta.net cloud service.
In addition, Schin says that DataProtect allows IT organizations to select any backup target they want regardless of whether the system being backed up is physical or virtual. Zetta.net makes use of Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) technology that is an extension of HTTP to replicate data between customers’ applications and data centers managed by Zetta.net. The Zetta.net service already includes integrated wide area network (WAN) optimization capabilities to improve the performance of backup and recovery in and out of the cloud.
While the ability to back up entire images has been around for a while, the usage of this approach to data protection has increased markedly in the age of the cloud. The backing up of images not only makes it easier to recover from a disaster, it still gives IT organizations the ability to recover specific files when necessary.
In effect, backup and recovery in the cloud is becoming the means to full disaster recovery that it was always meant to be. As Schin notes, in the event of a disaster, finding hardware systems to run images may be a challenge. Having those images accessible in a cloud in a way that doesn’t require a local appliance means IT organizations can download them and run them anywhere they need, whenever necessary.
