Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 3)

BRANCH OFFICE CONSOLIDATION WITH THE DELL POWERVAULT DL2000 –POWERED
BY COMMVAULT SIMPANA REPLICATION
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The proliferation of remote and branch office environments continues to increase
pressure on IT infrastructures and teams. No matter your organization’s size, you
likely need to include remote site management as part of your plan: it’s common
for large organizations to have 100 or more remote sites; most mid‐sized
organizations have somewhere between 25 and 100 remote sites; even small
organizations support remote systems that may be used in stand‐alone, small
office or home office settings.
While remote sites proliferate, the requirements for capturing, protecting and
preserving remote data have also increased. Data recovery is required not only to
support day‐to‐day business operations, but preservation of remote site data
including email and end‐user files is a legal requirement for organizations large
and small. But managing remote data is challenging and expensive, and places a
heavy management burden on already overworked IT personnel.
Most organizations have continued to rely on antiquated tape‐based approaches
to remote site data management. These approaches are slow, expensive, and
unreliable. They also require local office personnel to perform manual tasks, such
as rotation of tape cartridges and data recovery, for which the local personnel
typically are not well trained or well suited. Preserving data for disaster recovery
from these sites requires rotation of tapes to offsite storage locations, most often
by high‐cost services companies who charge to send trucks for tape pickup from
every site. Sometimes tapes are rotated offsite in the trunks of employees’ cars. In
effect, remote data is at risk and unprotected in most cases while also being a cost
drain to shrinking IT budgets.
A solution which has been available for some time but not often deployed, is to
centralize data for management from remote offices across Wide Area Network
(WAN) connections. Rather than attempting to manage data at remote sites
where data management infrastructure is insufficient, centralization brings that
data to datacenter locations where the infrastructure is robust. The cost savings
are enormous: retiring backup equipment and service contracts from remote sites
is an immediate benefit, while enabling local personnel to stay focused on their
work rather than being distracted with backup typically raises productivity. The
benefits to data management are similarly profound: datacenter locations more
often stay current with modern data management infrastructure and can,
therefore, more reliably protect, manage and preserve data and usually can also
restore it faster even over remote network connections back to remote sites and
systems.