As the amount of data that needs to be managed continues to grow, the backup and recovery process is increasingly out of control. Simply put, there’s too much data to be backed up over night on existing tape storage systems.

In a Weather the Economic Storm with a Smart Data Protection Strategy webinar sponsored by ExaGrid Systems and Symantec, it becomes clear that IT organizations need disk-based backup systems coupled with data deduplication software in order to stand a fighting chance when it come to backup and recovery.

Jeff Crum, a senior product manager for ExaGrid, reminds attendees that the growth of data does not pay any attention to the state of the IT budget. Disk-based backup systems not only speed recovery times; they also ensure the quality of those backups. About 30 percent of all restores from tape systems fail, notes Crum, while also noting that 90 percent of all the data that needs to be restored was recently saved. This creates a compelling argument for using disk-based systems for backup, while relegating tape storage to an archival role.

Arleen Urquhart, a senior product marketing manager for Symantec, add some perspective on the backup requirements of Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and SharePoint software, while also explaining how Symantec can now use one agent to manage all the instances of virtual machines on a given physical server. She also explains that one of the primary differences between Symantec’s Backup for Windows and NetBackup offerings is that the latter product comes with deduplication built in while the former relies of the deduplication technologies made available by Symantec partners such as ExaGrid.

Rating: Does a solid job of explaining the value of combining disk-based backup with data deduplication – TWM 1.