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Most organizations understand the importance of backup and make it a central part of their IT activities. But what many don’t realize is that backups often fail. And when they do, it can be a major headache. But there are cloud backup services that can help.
In this article, we will look at how you can ensure that your data is protected with a reliable backup solution using BlueXP backup and recovery.
Read on to find out how or use the links here to jump below:
- What Happens When Backups Go Wrong
- Achieving Backup Reliability with BlueXP Backup and Recovery
- The Reliable Backup Solution You’ve Been Looking For
What Happens When Backups Go Wrong
While backups have become part of the day-to-day IT operations of most organizations, backup reliability is a factor many fail to consider. In fact, just recently we’ve seen two high-profile backup failures make headlines worldwide.
First, on January 12, 2023, flights were grounded all across the U.S. due to an FAA outage caused by a corrupted backup file. One analyst expressed surprise that an organization as large as the FAA would experience corruption in its backup files. A modern backup solution should be able to provide reliability in a world where database corruption is a common point of failure.
Then, just over a week later, on January 26, 2023, chaos erupted during trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The error led to cancellation of thousands of trades involving over 250 stocks. Although ostensibly caused by an employee not shutting down the backup system properly, the outage could likely have been prevented with a modern backup solution that included built-in automation for routine processes.
These aren’t isolated examples. As we covered in our previous blog on backup reliability, reports show that 37% of all backup jobs and 34% of data restores fail, making almost one-third of worldwide backups useless. On the enterprise level, that’s simply not acceptable.
To avoid these types of failures, you need the most reliable backup technology solution in place. That’s where BlueXP comes in.
Achieving Backup Reliability with BlueXP Backup and Recovery
NetApp BlueXP backup and recovery is an automated backup service that creates incremental-forever, block-level backups for ONTAP systems that are stored in object format in the cloud or on-prem with StorageGRID appliances.
BlueXP backup and recovery makes sure your backups are reliable in several ways:
Independent Backups
Independent backup storage is essential for reliability, ensuring that you always have a way to restore data or systems in the event of a failure. Backups that aren’t independent can be affected by the same failure that causes the original system to fail, leaving your data unprotected.
BlueXP backup and recovery copies are more reliable because they’re stored independently from your ONTAP cluster:
- Copies can be stored either using disparately located NetApp StorageGRID® appliances or in the cloud using Amazon S3, Azure Blob storage, or Google Cloud Storage.
- By backing up to object storage, your backup system has an added layer of protection: some attack vectors will target a specific storage format. Keeping a copy in a different format prevents that. This is an idea enshrined in the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
- BlueXP backup copies are inherently secure, and resilient, meeting a high level of data security standards, including AES 256-bit encryption at rest, TLS/HTTPS encryption in flight, and immutable WORM state storage via Cloud Backup DataLock. This lowers the risk of data loss, supports your compliance efforts, and helps ensure business continuity.
Direct Backups
Indirect backup methods that rely on media gateways can create unreliable backups. In these systems, backup data is copied from the source and then moved to a media gateway, where it resides before it reaches its final destination storage environment.
Unfortunately, beyond slowing down backups, which leads to missed backup windows, indirect back up methods create another potential point of failure. They also open you up to man-in-the-middle attacks. By compromising the media gateway, attackers can intercept data on its way to being backed up—reading, modifying, or even deleting the data and potentially stopping it from being backed up at all—leaving your organization vulnerable.
BlueXP backup and recovery provides more reliable, direct backups:
- As a modern backup solution that backs up directly to object storage, BlueXP backup and recovery does not require a media gateway, speeding up backups and eliminating the media gateway as a potential point of failure for data.
- This direct backup method also ensures that all of your existing ONTAP storage efficiencies remain in place, keeping the time and costs of backup transfers and storage low.
- Backups are entirely managed or automated through the BlueXP console, eliminating third-party consoles that can be additional failure points that can add to management overheads.
Total Protection
Older backup software often struggles to keep up with the data-heavy demands of today’s organizations. Backup systems using the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) can be unacceptably slow, missing backup windows or skipping mission-critical data. That adds up to unreliable backups.
BlueXP solves this problem in several ways:
- BlueXP backup and recovery works fast and protects everything: metadata, access control lists, and even open files.
- With incremental forever, block-level backups, you don’t waste time copying data that hasn’t changed since the baseline copy was created, and you never need to recreate the baseline copy. That means backups are faster, without the chance of losing any of your information.
- Using object storage with your choice of hyperscalers gives your backup data eleven-nines data durability.
- For database users, full integration with SnapCenter® means even databases in use can be fully backed up and consistent.
- BlueXP incorporates automation to help speed up time-consuming back up processes, including scheduled back up jobs, automatic volume discovery, and offering all its functionality through APIs.
- Backup copies are based on NetApp Snapshot™ technology, giving you copies which are immutable by nature so they can’t be modified. If you ever need to recover, you’ll get 100% of your data back, exactly as it was at the time of backup.
There’s More to Backing up with BlueXP
While NetApp has provided a number of different backup solutions over the years, BlueXP backup and recovery goes further, offering the most robust, dedicated backup service we’ve ever offered.
- BlueXP backup and recovery is designed specifically for use with ONTAP, making it the hands-down most reliable backup solution for your ONTAP data. You’ll retain all of ONTAP’s storage efficiencies while getting backups that are 100X faster to create, easy to restore, and much more reliable than with any other solution.
- BlueXP also provides advanced customization, including storing additional copies of backup data in different regions, with different cloud providers, and using different cloud accounts so you always have multiple routes to access your backup data.
- And with built-in advanced ransomware protection features, BlueXP keeps your backup data locked so it can’t be corrupted or deleted, scans for any attempts to do so, and then automatically alerts you if any suspicious activity is found.
The Reliable Backup Solution You’ve Been Looking For
Keeping regular backups should be something that helps you rest easy at night. But those backups need to be reliable. BlueXP backup and recovery can help make sure that’s the case.
BlueXP backup and recovery gives you backups you can rely on, integrated seamlessly to protect all your cloud or on-premises data, databases, and virtual machines.
