Backup & Restore

Put an end to backup gymnastics!

The most common complaint from those with IT responsibilities concerns backup and restore. Backups are typically time-consuming, inconvenient and often unreliable and restores are slow, laborious and often incomplete.

Modern computer storage solutions offer several tiers of data protection and can work quite easily with existing installed software. First, Snapshots can replace daily incremental backups and can eliminate the backup window. Backups can be made at any time without bringing down applications or inconveniencing users. Secondly, third-party backup and restore software can include tape and tape automation in this process, adding an archive and portability element to the mix. And finally, Replication can copy both NAS and SAN data to an off-site, secondary systems for full disaster recovery.

Now backups can be run any time you want them, can leverage your current investment and can even be automatically moved off-site on your schedule. Read more below about our technologies, partner products and solutions.

Data Protection

Secure your business data today

Modern systems have been armed with a host of data protection technologies to provide the level of security that is right for your business.

All solutions are shipped with different levels of RAID-type protection on the hard disk drive array. The RAID scheme provides protection for your data in the case of a drive failure: the failing drive is replaced and the RAID group automatically rebuilds the array from the surviving drives. Some solutions allow additional drives to be added to the array at any time to increase capacity and fault tolerance providing protection for your data in the event of up to two concurrent drive failures.

The time to recover from a failed drive can be enhanced with the addition of a global hot spare. This is an additional drive that carries no data until impending drive failure is detected. In this case the hot spare rebuilds the data from the flagged drive without waiting for a replacement drive to be found, typically before the drive actually fails, ensuring continued protection for your data.

A standby chassis can help provide additional level of protection and can be swapped in as little as fifteen minutes.

Storage Consolidation

Lowering your cost of storage

One of the most common IT projects today is storage consolidation – migrating from local or direct attached storage to some form of networked storage. Data Minds engineers can architect solutions that are the best fit to your storage needs.  The solutions are flexible, scalable and offer varying range features from simplicity being the main objective to the highest performing ones.

Not ready for SAN? No problem, add a NAS device and migrate block storage later either via low-cost iSCSI or opt for the high performance Fiber Channel solution when you are ready.  Either way, Data Minds engineers are here to assist you with your DAS, NAS or SAN needs.

Disaster Recovery

Easy to Manage Offsite Data Protection

Many storage solutions come with Replication feature, which enables administrators to replicate data from the "source" device to one or more “destination” units. File-based or block-based data can be easily replicated over a WAN to a remote location to protect data in the event of a disaster or to distribute data to remote offices.

Replication provides simple, easy-to-manage off-site data protection and can be implemented in one to one, one to many, many to one, and round robin fashion. Replication is a useful tool for offsite backup, data distribution, or simple round-robin geographic disaster insulation. Source data can be automatically updated to remote units while the locally created originals remain in service. Replicated data is periodically updated to remain current and available for applications such as disaster recovery, offloading tape backup, read-only data distribution, testing on nonproduction storage systems, online data migration, and more.

Replication software has many bandwidth-saving features that lower the infrastructure cost of data replication and disaster recovery. After replication is initialized, only new and changed blocks need to be updated over the network. Replicating only changes significantly reduces network
bandwidth requirements. In addition, replication software takes checkpoints during data transfers. If a transfer is interrupted, it will restart from the most recent checkpoint. Replication also performs intelligent resynchronization, eliminating the need for full transfers when recovering from a broken replica or loss of synchronization.

Server Virtualization

Maximize resources and minimize disruption

One of the most exciting complementary technologies for network storage is virtualization. Virtual machines can simplify server spending, maximize hardware investment and smoothly expand or shrink server workloads and the possibilities for better availability and recovery are not just for datacenter customers.

Virtual servers in smaller environments also leverage dedicated storage, and can be implemented economically through iSCSI. Complete virtual servers and their applications can be backed up, restored, replicated and snapshotted using system tools, and data is protected at all times by the systems' modern architectures.

Just as server virtualization separates servers from their hardware, the storage devices separate storage from its hardware. The systems' flexibility stems from their ability to serve data to most kinds of clients and most kinds of networks through intelligent software.

Database / Email Storage

Providing availability and efficiency to database and email environments

Today's business applications depend heavily on underlying databases such as SQL Server and Oracle® to facilitate vital business operations (financial transactions) and communications (email). Databases supporting these mission-critical applications are growing in both size and importance. Unavailable ERP or Exchange applications can halt business operations and cause significant business risk. Consolidating database data onto a unified and flexible storage solution produces allow for greater availability, productivity, and cost efficiency.

For most SMBs, a mission critical application such as Exchange drives their first SAN infrastructure in their environment. Data Minds supported storage solutions combine enterprise-class storage platforms with feature-rich data and system protection software to simplify data management and provide highly available data storage for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle, while delivering reduced costs, enhanced asset utilization, and increased performance.