How does a DR Appliance Work?

Hi, my name's Danny German. I work out of the Quest office in Sydney, Australia. I'm a pre-sales consultant and I look after the data protection portfolio. In today's short video I'm just going to give you a quick rundown of how our DR appliances and how they fit into your environment. So what you're looking at on the screen is a typical backup infrastructure. In the middle you've got your backup software, your backup server with your backup software. DR appliance supports all the major brands of backup software. You have a tape drive on the left side and on the right hand side, you have your data. Your server data that you're going to back up. In this case I've just got a simple Windows server. What you do, you run your backups at night. You could do. Typically they go to local disk on the backup server, and then you sweep them off to tape. OK? This local disk is used for short term retention of your backups. Typically most people keep a couple of days worth of data on here before it gets removed, and then you rely on your tape to do the restoration. This is where the DR appliance comes in, all right? So you keep your backup server and your backup software, but you take this disk and you replace it with a DR appliance. OK? So your backups now afloat from your Windows server through your backup software, and off to the DR appliance. When it hits that appliance, it compresses the data and then deduplicates is. So it searches for common blocks. So it's very efficient at storing backup data. So instead of just getting a couple of days worth of backups on disk, you can suddenly get days, weeks, months, perhaps years worth of backup data on here. So instead of going back to tape to do the restoration, you can restore it directly from disk. So basically speeding up your restore. So that's the first function of the DR appliance. The second function is replication. So you want to make sure your backups are off site. That's what you'd use tape for. OK? So supposing you have an office in Sydney and you've got an office in Melbourne. What you can do is you can put an appliance on each site and replicate the data to and from the two different offices. So bidirectional replication or one way if you want. All right, so suddenly all your backup data is now off site. It's very efficient on the WAN replications, so it works over a fairly small WAN link. And that allows you to, perhaps, completely get rid of type. Some customers do that, some prefer to keep tape and perhaps use this method to do daily and weekly backups and then still have tape for a really long term rotation. Perhaps yearly or monthly backups. OK, so there we go. There's a quick rundown of what the DR appliances are. So the compression deduplication for your backup, store your backups for longer on disc, and then have a replication software built into them to get the data off site. If you need any more information there's a bunch of different sizes of these appliances. So if you need any more information, happy to help out. Please reach out to me. Thank you for watching.