One of the most pervasive trends in IT is the tendency of data storage needs to grow greater over time. Whereas the typical organization once measured storage requirements in the megabytes and gigabytes, it is common today to think in terms of terabytes or even petabytes.
Fortunately, the steadily decreasing cost of storage has made it easy to meet ever-expanding storage needs without breaking the bank. At the same time, the availability of cloud infrastructure has simplified data storage by providing organizations access to virtually limitless storage space.
What remains very challenging, however, is backing up all of that data quickly and routinely -- especially when the data is stored or backed up in the cloud and must be transferred over the network to perform backups. Growth in network bandwidth has not kept pace with the increase in data volume. As a result, organizations today often struggle to back up all of their data quickly and efficiently.
Consider, for example, an organization that has just 1 terabyte of data to back up - not an especially large amount by today’s standards. Even with a very fast network connection of 1000 megabits per second upload speeds, it would take about 2.5 hours to upload that terabyte -- and that’s assuming that no other traffic is sharing the connection at the same time. On a more typical network connection of 100 megabits per second, the data upload would take more than a day.
At those rates, the time required to back up data today is unacceptable in many cases. It can make it impossible to perform a full data backup on a daily or even weekly basis. And the less often you back up data, the higher your risk of losing critical information if a disaster occurs.
Case Study: StratX’s Cloud Storage Needs
The challenge described above is one that StratX IT Solutions, a managed service provider (MSP) serving New York, New Jersey, and New England, knows quite well.
As a large MSP, StratX supports more than 200 customers and backs up more than a thousand devices and servers. Its backup storage needs to amount to about 350 terabytes. StratX leverages Wasabi Hot Storage to provide infrastructure for backing up that data. By offering lower data storage costs and a simpler pricing model than major public cloud providers, Wasabi helps StratX achieve a cost-effective backup strategy. Wasabi’s cloud storage also supports the HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, SOC 2, and other compliance needs that are crucial for some of StratX’s customers.
Yet on their own, Wasabi’s cost-effective and compliance-friendly cloud storage solutions were not always enough to support StratX’s backup needs.
The Solution: MSP360 Synthetic Full Backup to Wasabi Hot Storage
With the help of MSP360 Backup, however, StratX has achieved a dramatic improvement in data backup and recovery time while still taking advantage of low-cost storage from Wasabi.
That is because MSP360 Backup offers a feature called Synthetic Full Backup. The feature makes it possible to upload only data that has changed since the most recent backup when performing a new backup. More specifically, it backs up only the individual blocks within a backup image that have been changed since the last backup was performed.
In this way, Synthetic Full Backup allows users to perform full data backups without having to upload all of their data each time they wish to create a new backup. Overall, Synthetic Full Backup is about 80 percent faster than a conventional full backup.
In addition to backing up data more efficiently, Synthetic Full Backup also allows users, if they wish, to select only specific files within a backup image for recovery. In this way, too, the feature saves time and reduces bandwidth requirements.
Because the MSP360 Synthetic Full Backup feature has now been integrated with Wasabi Hot Storage, StratX can take advantage of the functionality to keep its data up-to-date in a much more efficient way.
MSP360 Backup has thus simplified StratX’s backup management processes while allowing the company to perform backups much more quickly.
“We have had lots of clients on MSP360 for over a year and are very happy with the product,” Mortell said.
