• Executive Summary

• Benefits & Features

• Components

• Configurations 

• Key Management

• Documentation

• Frequently Asked Questions

Secure Data Solution^® for Midrange Systems

Overview & Benefits

The Secure Data Solution^® (SDS) is an enterprise data backup and recovery suite that assures your company’s critical backup data sets are automatically protected, moved offsite, and archived at a remote location. As the word “enterprise” implies, it works with virtually any platform in your data center. This overview is intended to describe how the SDS is used to back up and subsequently recover data for midrange systems. The process of writing sensitive data to physical tapes, often times directly attached to individual midrange servers, is widely accepted. The process is also coming under increasing scrutiny as both the efficiency and the security of such practices are widely questioned.

One of the major benefits of the Secure Data Solution (SDS) for midrange systems is that it consolidates the media for the backup and makes its management and protection possible. It does this by connecting to a series of midrange servers by either fibre channel or SCSI. Once connected, the SDS emulates one or more SCSI-attached tape drives for each midrange server. The backups are then accomplished in the normal fashion using your existing backup and archival software.

The Secure Data Solution is a totally outboard system that replaces tape drives and does not require the installation of agents on the midrange server. Because there are no agents on the server, the solution integrates seamlessly with most of the midrange backup software in use today, including Tivoli Storage Manager, Net Backup, Veritas, etc. Likewise, it has the flexibility to replace locally attached tape drives including Fibre Channel/SCSI-attached 3590- and LTO- series tape drives.

Once a backup has been completed, and the appropriate data is resident on the Secure Data Solution, the stored data is compressed and encrypted so that it can be moved to one or more remote locations. The compressed data can be moved over a fiber channel network or over an Ethernet network using standard TCP/IP.

At the remote location(s), the data is likewise stored on disk as virtual tape images. Each data set is stored in two separate disk areas at each location—one each on mirrored disks at the originating site, and one each on mirrored disks at each of the remote location. This configuration assures that the data is always available at all locations, and can be restored at any location should the need arise.

The Secure Data Solution approach for data backup and recovery offers the following immediate benefits:

• Increases probability of successful rapid recovery

• Decreases reliance on scarce DR resources

• Reduces or eliminates the cost of physical tape cartridges

• Reduces backup window due to increased speed of disc storage

• Reduces tape handling and associated costs

• Reduces the possibility of lost tapes

• Provides a homogeneous method of managing backups

• Provides ultra-high availability, real-time data backup

• Utilizes low-cost TCP/IP for data transport

• Utilizes high availability redundant disks

It also provides an array of unique security benefits that protects your sensitive data and ensures compliance with a growing host of federal regulations relating to data security.

• Provides Role-Based Access Controls to protect various types of data

• Provides a non-intrusive, patented key management strategy

• Includes an integrated alert manager to ensure the integrity of each backup

• Provides three levels of data protection: encryption, geographic dispersion, and mirroring

• Reduces tape handling and associated costs

• Reduces the possibility of lost tapes

• Provides a homogeneous method of managing backups

• Provides ultra-high availability, real-time data backup

• Utilizes low-cost TCP/IP for data transport

• Utilizes high availability redundant disks

Provide the perfect Disaster Recovery plan for your Virtual Tape Library with Secure Data Solution^®
 

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