Windows Enterprise Data Protection with Symantec Backup Exec™—Best Practices for Implementing a Centralized, SAN-Based Infrastructure

Feb 05, 2009 in IT - Security

Today’s enterprises face a growing data protection challenge: how to optimize the backup and recovery of a volume of business-critical data that grows larger each day and, in many cases, doubles each year.
Most enterprises are finding that their IT footprint and storage resources continue to grow at a rate of 40 to 50 percent per year, which adds considerable complexity to their existing data protection strategies. This challenge becomes yet more difficult as companies migrate from stand-alone Windows® server backups to enterprise site-wide backups that are performed across their Local Area Network (LAN) and Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. With the data protection landscape becoming more distributed and IT resources growing increasingly constrained, businesses need a centralized data protection strategy that can efficiently manage multiple backup and recovery jobs across the enterprise. In addition, the data protection strategy must be able to support an off-host backup strategy to efficiently minimize the impact on mission-critical applications and interruption to network users, and take advantage of the speed of disk-based data protection. Symantec Backup Exec™ 12.5 addresses these critical enterprise challenges with the following cutting-edge features: Central Admin Server Option, Backup Exec Infrastructure Manager, SAN Shared Storage Option, and dynamic disk-based data protection. These four features are the subjects of this paper.