ExaGrid publishes Guide to Data Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. has published a comprehensive book offering IT professionals and CIOs straightforward and pragmatic guidance to help them evaluate various cloud offerings for data backup and disaster recovery. According to this new ExaGrid-published book, while the cloud offers many opportunities for companies to gain operational efficiencies, it is not necessarily a panacea for data backup and disaster recovery in all situations. Organisations need to carefully evaluate their data backup needs and requirements to ensure they can be met by various cloud scenarios.

“ExaGrid currently supports many cloud solutions and strongly believes that the cloud has a place in data backup and recovery. However, IT managers need to separate hype from reality when it comes to data backup, and potential users should look closely at the strengths and weaknesses of each cloud-based scenario,” said ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews in the book Straight Talk About the Cloud for Data Backup and Disaster Recovery. “This book helps IT leaders navigate through these difficult choices to understand where data backup to the cloud can be effectively used.”

Andrews, a 25-year veteran of high technology, and author of Straight Talk About Disk Backup with Deduplication, said the objective with the new cloud book is to help IT organisations understand the strengths and weaknesses of the cloud for data backup and disaster recovery. The book explains the key considerations for using the private, public, and hybrid cloud so the reader can understand when it makes the best sense to leverage various cloud solutions. The book also offers pros and cons of a variety of private, public, and hybrid scenarios. In addition, the book includes suggestions and questions to ask vendors and cloud providers to help IT professionals decide where the cloud may logically fit in their environment to meet site-specific data backup and recovery needs.

The book is available for download by visiting the ExaGrid website.

Here is an example of a key take away from the book:
· Data size and recovery times are key factors in determining the best cloud-based solution. While the public cloud can be used for data backup by organisations with data sizes of under 500GB, for data sizes of 500GB or greater, either a private cloud or hybrid cloud model is the best approach in order to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for data backup. This conclusion is backed by a November 2012 Gartner report, “Is Cloud Backup Right for Your Servers?” in which Gartner determined that 50GB was the maximum backup or restore data size to fit a “reasonable window” for cloud backup and restores, given bandwidth and Internet/WAN latency.

The book is broken into seven chapters, including cloud model definitions and scenarios, detailed assessments of the public cloud for data backup and disaster recovery scenarios, and pros and cons of seven different disaster recovery scenarios. It also includes a set of questions that IT organisations should ask vendors and cloud providers when evaluating a cloud-based solution.

ExaGrid also recently announced a partnership with ATScloud, the premier hybrid-cloud solution provider, which extends the core ExaGrid product’s disk backup with deduplication capabilities to enable disaster recovery in the cloud.