Ace Data Corporate Film premieres at CIO Power List event in Lonavla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GdVcTCwNBQ

Protecting Small Databases

A lot of SME’s get concerned about protecting their databases – typically SQL database. The interesting challenge is the fact that they are really small databases having extremely critical data.

While traditionally a standalone tape based backup solution would be considered ideal, it is not so simple. Since a 50-60 GB database normally compresses down to 10-15 GB, it does not deserve that kind of investment into tapes, each of which is capable of holding terabytes. It ends up holding too small a data and therefore costs more per GB.

With the changing times, better options are available depending on what you want to achieve:

A simple backup could help maintain multiple versions and copies and give you old and new recoveries when required. While this gives flexibility of versioning, the recovery process would take some time based on the kind of resources available.

Alternatively, if you are looking for a quick access to your data even after a disaster, replicating –especially mirroring – is the best option. To keep it in economical range, you can use native mirroring capabilities rather than investing in third party tools.

Ace Data Abhraya offers both: Cloud based backup for option 1 and cloud based infrastructure for option 2 with committed recovery SLA. Infact for SQL databases, you can opt for recovery on cloud infrastructure with option of recovering only database or complete server on cloud while enjoying the flexibility of versioning and compliance, and investing very less based on the backup size usage only.

Processing Big Data

While many think it is difficult to manage data beyond a volume, technologists don’t agree with this. Newer technologies keep coming in to handle and process large volume of data. Consider Google search. While you are typing what you want to search, it starts autocompleting for you and starts showing you results as well.

All this is done by using clusters of servers at the backend. Data that goes in is processed by these servers so you get a good pool of processors and memory to take it in. Further to this, the storage network used behind to read/write this data offers a huge choice.

If it is a file based data, you can go for a sale-out NAS. If you have to handle block level data, scale-out SAN options are available. To help the really heavy databases, pure Flash based storage is now available.

Flash based storages help achieve upto a few million IOPS especially when they perform on inline deduplication done in the memory. Scale out storage there ensures that adding more capacity automatically gives you more memory to handle the new IOs and deduplication help control the requirement of storage since it could otherwise go for a big on budget.

How much Data is good for business?

When you talk of sources of data generation, there is an endless list. Any business stream would have a long list to show how data is getting generated and how much data is being generated. Often businesses get scared with so much of data as they think handling it is a mammoth task. Indeed it is a mammoth task as it needs good investments and infrastructure to handle it. However, if utilized properly, the benefits are much higher. The way businesses are competing, it would soon become inevitable to handle it carefully.

The more data you have, more opportunity you get to see how your products, services and customers behave. There are many examples of business being able to analyse their data patterns and offer more discounts or value added services to give their customer a delightful experience. The new databases handling this Big Data have come up with Multi Parallel Processing technologies and the new applications to handle unstructured data ensure that even if you have PetaBytes of data, you can still do real time analysis and produce results in nano seconds.

Let us enjoy this new revolution on the way technology and businesses are getting shaped up and reap the benefits of these.

Cloud for Better Management

One big benefit that cloud computing brings in is the hands-off management for the technology user and the internal IT team. When you are hosting applications in-house and build your own infrastructure, you need a lot of expertise in managing the same. You need to have a dedicated application & database manager who is well-qualified to handle this portfolio.

For a large enterprise this may not be a challenge, and they can take care of the staff augmentation challenges. For SMBs though, this could be a big concern. It is for this reason most of them are not able to leverage the benefits of enterprise applications.

Getting the same application on the Cloud brings in the management components with it. A good service provider will ensure that your applications are taken well care of and they are up and running 24x7 with optimal performance. An exceptional service provider would even have a disaster recovery site to ensure smooth operations even if his own Cloud Data Center poses any threat or challenge.

Using Cloud for Disaster Recovery

The base premise of disaster recovery is the way you handle your business in case your primary business site meets a disaster. In my opinion, disaster recovery can be considered as an IT subset of the overall Business Continuity Planning including non IT factors of business as well.

When an organization chooses to host applications on cloud, it automatically gets into the first level of disaster recovery. The application along with all its data is already in a remote data center and the loss of your primary business premise does not affect access to applications and data. They can still be accessed from any other computer and internet connection.

You can also opt for a disaster recovery site for your service provider. This could add to the budget but ensures your data safety and continuity even if their data center is in trouble.

For a low cost disaster recovery option, Ace Data Abhraya would be the right choice for organizations where investment in full online disaster recovery site is still a long way to go. Ace Data Abhraya offers unique backup propositions wherein your backed up data can be used remotely in the event of a primary site disaster, while it continues to offer all the benefits of daily backups which are compressed and deduplicated on-premise to minimize the load on the bandwidth.

In the coming days, we would explain how using Ace Data Abhraya in different deployment scenarios helps organizations achieve disaster recovery for their critical data.