The Case for IP SANs - Today, however, backup is a necessary evil in need of a dramatic overhaul. Overnight backup windows are no longer sufficient to back up a rapidly increasing amount of data. Backups to tape often fail because of application or user errors. More urgently, restoring from tape is unacceptably slow when access to email, business applications, and the Internet is fundamental to day-to-day business. Nevertheless, tape backup provides the ability to easily migrate data for offsite storage, a critical requirement.

Problems Solved - Deploying a dedicated IP SAN with Nimbus iSCSI storage solves two problems. First, it offloads backup traffic from the LAN, increasing backup performance and reducing congestion that can slow down your application servers. Second, using a disk-based storage system such as the Breeze series as a backup target results in faster backups and, more importantly, dramatically faster restores. Restoring from a Nimbus system takes a fraction of the time of a restore from tape. Using a Nimbus IP SAN for your nightly backups and quick restores, while still using tape for weekly backups and offsite archival, provides a comprehensive solution that addresses the need to minimize downtime cost-effectively.