Tape backup technology became popular in the early 1960s. IBM pioneered the technology, creating the first tape libraries and introducing tape media for data backup into the public domain.
Today, many organizations, governments, and professional institutions still rely on tape backup for legacy systems; however, the use of tapes is rapidly declining. This decline has been hastened by the surge in cloud computing, with many tech firms adopting flexible cloud backup solutions.
Atlantic.Net has various backup solutions available; all of our Cloud solutions are underpinned by a managed cloud backup service. This is a flexible service that can be enabled with the click of a mouse. For our Managed Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting customers, we can provide a fully managed Veeam Backup solution and also a proprietary Atlantic.Net Cloud Platform (ACP) Backups.
What is Cloud Backup?
Atlantic.Net’s Cloud Backups are a fully automated, flexible service that is surprisingly easy to set up; for the Atlantic.Net Cloud Platform (ACP) Backups, you only have to press a checkbox when building a Virtual Machine or when adding a backup to an existing Atlantic.Net VM. Cloud Backups enables File-Level Recovery as well as Full System Restore capabilities.
Optional ACP Offsite Backups are protected offsite using the latest offsite backup technology. Did you know that you can even take a separate snapshot of a server and export it to another Atlantic.Net location, or recover the snapshot onto a brand new VM? ACP Snapshots are great when upgrading your server, as they offer a working rollback option.
What is a Managed Veeam Service?
Veeam is a highly versatile agent-based backup solution that works incredibly well with both Virtual Machines and Physical Hosts. Veeam can back up entire environments and restore data into sandbox locations for testing. The service offers significant savings, as we onboard you to our licensing model, meaning significantly less financial outlay when compared with creating your own Veeam solution.
The incremental forever backups are super-fast and very lightweight, and recovery is lightning-quick and bulletproof, as each backup is validated for integrity prior to being marked successful. Veeam can snapshot data and replicate critical datasets to an alternative Atlantic.Net location.
Why Replace Your Tape Backups?
Tape libraries are hugely expensive to buy, maintain, license, and replace if a fault occurs. Tape media is pricey, and its capacity may be considered too small for modern enterprise workloads. Tape libraries have limited scalability, as each library can only expand to a predefined number of tape drives. If you run out of drives, you need to purchase an entirely new library and pool resources.
Tape read and write access speeds are also considered very slow, and tape backups are inefficient as they can often span multiple tapes, resulting in slow media inventories when attempting to restore a backup set from tape.
The tape media degrades over time and can easily become damaged, especially if dropped by mistake. There is a lot of manual effort needed to accurately track tape rotations, and tapes are prone to getting stuck in the tape drive mechanism, often requiring an on-site engineer to fix.
What are the Advantages of a Managed Backup Service?
Atlantic.Net Cloud Backup solutions don’t have the problems with efficiency, fragility, and cost that tape backups have. They are fully managed services, meaning that you do not need to worry about the backend systems; Atlantic.Net will look after all of that. Our solutions are disk-based, and our locations are interconnected using rapid network connectivity for seamless data transfer.
Another major problem with tape backups is the day-to-day management of the tape media. Skilled media administrators are difficult to find, and tape rotations are very difficult to manage accurately unless sophisticated tape handling processes are defined or expensive tape management software is used.
These complexities can result in human error, potentially resulting in missed backups or incorrectly following the backup rotation policy. All of these limitations make it very easy to lose track of tapes or miss key backup schedules, such as month- or year-end backups, and mismanagement of tape backups can create issues such as the wrong backup tapes being sent to offsite storage.
Again, with a managed backup service from Atlantic.Net, these problems go away. Our highly trained backup specialists monitor, manage, and maintain all our backup platforms 24x7x365.
Getting Started with Cloud Backups
We are proud to welcome you to the Atlantic.Net Cloud Backups service and the Veeam Managed Service. Both are designed to protect your critical data in the cloud and eliminate the problems of inefficiency created by tape backups.
There are significant advantages to embracing cloud backup and save technology. You can transfer your infrastructure to our cloud backup storage, ensuring you have the critical restore points needed for your organization’s disaster recovery and data retention requirements.
The technology provides multiple opportunities for cost savings, including an OPEX cost model that only charges our customers for what they use on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cost savings can be recovered by saving on the manpower needed to manage the backup solution, as this responsibility is managed by Atlantic.Net; you can rest assured that all your critical data is backed up as per the terms of our SLA agreement, leaving you the time to concentrate on your core business.
The Cloud Backup solution utilizes an advanced agentless technology that uses none of the customer’s system resources, and industry-leading deduplication technology drastically cuts bandwidth utilization and reduces overall storage costs.
Data is saved on the Atlantic.Net proprietary cloud storage solution; this custom-designed technology offers immense flexibility, usability, and accessibility. Best of all, we can ingest huge quantities of data into the cloud storage without restriction. The storage provides fault tolerance, redundancy, and data replication capabilities between your choice of 8 data center locations.
Cloud Archiving
Our existing customers enjoy an agile cloud solution that provides secure storage of business-critical data in their preferred location. Cloud archiving is a non-disruptive service where the only prerequisite is network connectivity.
Some of our clients choose to operate the service over their existing network circuits, while others decide to purchase additional dedicated backup circuits for more intense workloads. Our customers can utilize their existing trusted backup software as part of this service if required.
Cloud Archiving streamlines the entire backup process, reduces costs, and provides our clients with class-leading service level agreements for data retrieval. The customer systems can remain on-premise, as the data is transferred to the Atlantic.Net storage solutions.
Gone are the days of painstakingly slow restore requests, managing the process of recalling tapes, or waiting for the tapes to be located or couriered to site; instead, data is available near-instantly and on-demand, and there is no need to wait hours, days, weeks for data recovery.
Ready to get started with Atlantic.Net Cloud Backups and Veeam Managed Service? Contact Atlantic.Net today and we’ll help you take advantage of our easy-to-use backups, and can help you with a plan to transfer your data from your legacy tape backup system to our environment!
