Why backup is essential for your company and how to choose your solution

How important is your virtual infrastructure and how important are your data? What if you lose all of you infrastructure tomorrow? Are you prepared to recover efficiently? If your answer is "No" , or "I don’t know" it’s time to get some clues.

The probability of a disk to fail one day or another is literally 100%. The question is not "Is there a risk that I lose my data ?" The question is "When will I lose data ?" and "Which are the data I can’t afford to lose ?"

Of course, all data don't have the same value, and all the backup solutions don't have the same cost. Continuous replication is a wonderful solution, but maybe it's not the solution you need. The only thing you need to be convinced right now, is that you must be prepared for a data loss.

How to choose your solution?

To protect your XenServer infrastructure, solutions are numerous. Full backup, incremental delta backup, Continuous replication and even file level recovery tools... Xen Orchestra is providing a whole range of backups solutions. And you may wonder the one you really need for your company and how to choose it. Answer to the following questions will give you a big hint about the solution you really need.

1. How quickly do you need to recover from an IT disaster? Can you afford days of downtime? An hours? Few minutes?

2. What are the amount of data you are prepared to lose? Days worth? One day worth? Nothing more than an hour?

3. Are you prepared to handle what you need? The financial cost? The bandwidth cost? The storage cost?

Which solution for which needs ?

Now that you have answered the three previous questions, you should find the best option for you in the following features.

• Downtime is not a major issue and I'm ready to lose potentially days (or more) of data. The biggest consideration is the cost. And backup storage space or speed is less important.
  Your solution is Full backup.

• You can afford some downtime but you don't want to lose a lot of data. You want fast backups done every day using a minimal space possible. Your solution is Delta backup.

• Downtime is the biggest preoccupation, you want to recover as quickly as possible. Cost is an issue, but not backup speed and/or bandwidth usage across remote sites. Your solution is: Disaster Recovery.

• You can't afford downtime nor data loss. Your solution is: Continuous replication.

Why choosing Xen Orchestra for your XenServer backup?

Xen Orchestra is providing a wide range of backups solutions dedicated to XenServer or XCP-ng infrastructure.

• We are XenServer experts and we develop XCP-ng, our product is dedicated to these two hypervisors users and include the pro support
• Our flat rate pricing system is easy to understand and very competitive whatever the solution you need
• Xen Orchestra is much more than a simple backup solution, it's the XenServer best ally for administration, backup and Cloud

Note that all backup solutions (full and delta) are able to be fully recovered on a brand new XenServer, whenever and wherever you need. Even a freshly imported XOA is able to recover the backup stored on your remote.

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