LAN/Server Free Backup Solutions

• Crossroads Server Free Datasheet (Acrobat PDF format)

Downtime just isn't acceptable when your company's top asset is your data. That's why we spend time, money and resources keeping data secure and available for immediate access. Globalization and "Internet Time" have shrunk the business recovery window to almost zero, and made customer access as close to instantaneous as you can get. That's why storage management is so important.

At Crossroads, quality means consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Crossroads has been developing, testing, installing, and supporting storage routers for over five years. No other storage router company can match the quality and experience of the Crossroads team.

Storage capacity is doubling every year because increasingly complex applications continue to grow the average file size. Fortunately, memory cost is continually decreasing. However, mission critical applications are moving from the mainframe to the network while server consolidation is forcing workgroups to merge into larger networks. Simply, all of these add traffic to the LAN as 24/7 operations are becoming the norm.

When storage is shared across servers data is easier to manage and to maintain. That means growth for your business, and that's why SANs are a remarkable improvement over traditional server-attached storage. If you remove data traffic off the LAN you ease LAN congestion. All backup and restore traffic is confined to the SAN; nothing needs to flow through the LAN.

Traditional backup placed the application server, the backup server and the LAN all in the data path. Consequently, as the amount of storage grows, the time needed to backup the data grows. Since businesses are moving toward 24/7 operations, backup operations will eventually compete with business critical applications. Invariably, this will cause network congestion and operation slowdown.

When data is shared in a SAN, the backup operation can be taken off the LAN. With LAN free backup only the backup server, the source, the destination devices and the SAN devices are in the data path. This way the application server and the LAN are no longer affected.

Further bottlenecks can be eliminated with server free backup. The backup server issues the command to a data mover in the SAN, and then removes itself from the data path. This way only the source, destination and SAN devices are involved. The logic is obvious, because it frees the CPU cycles on the server for business critical applications, and supports server consolidation. The dedicated backup server is no longer needed.