Not so long ago, the only way to back up a decent amount of data was by using TAPES. The most obvious reason was the cost. Hard drives were expensive and if you had to keep a little history, the cost would go up even further.
That was in 2006. But what happened next was almost a revolution. Hard drives got bigger, much bigger and cheap.
But that was not the only thing that revolutionizes backup. This was also the era of cheap NAS boxes popping up. Three vendors that started the NAS revolution are Synology, QNAP, and Thecus. They offered boxes which enabled 5 drive SATA raid for a very decent price.
Many companies replaced their tape drives with NAS boxes. They even placed them on remote locations and had copies of the backup as well. That was all great until ransomware type of viruses started wreaking havoc on many enterprises. Local folders and network shares were affected. Data that was supposed to be saved, was not anymore. Luckily Nakivo knew about the potential threats and made it possible to deploy Nakivo Backup and Replication on a variety of NAS devices. From my favorite Synology to Qnap to WD. Backup Repository is not exposed as a shared drive. That means that backup data can not be encrypted via various ransomware threats.
Still, demand for tape drive support is on the rise. No matter what type of virus hits your company, the backup tape is safe and offline, so it cant be encrypted or damaged in the attack process. The last line of defense is backup. This has been seen in so many attacks on American municipalities and health institutions.
If the institution had a bad backup policy in place, they lost the data. Some paid even $500.000 and more, just to get back their data. On the other hand, if the institution had a proper backup in place, they restore the data once they cleaned the infection.
If you are a Nakivo Backup and Replication user, or you are evaluating Nakivo as a backup solution, then I have great news.
Nakivo just released Nakivo Backup and Replication 9.1 beta. In this release, Nakivo introduces native tape support which is great for a long term and offline storage.
You can use both LTO tape libraries and tape drives. This is important for big enterprises and SMBs as both can leverage the benefit of the LTO tapes.
If you don’t yet know Nakivo, it is a backup company to watch. They have a great release policy. The update their product with new features frequently. They support VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHW, Amazon AWS EC2, and even physical Windows servers. What is also important is that you can install Nakivo on practically any platform. You can install it on Windows, Linux, Synology NAS, WD NAS, Even Free NAS. In addition, you can install Nakivo on Raspberry PI.
Nakivo will backup in applications in app-aware mode, meaning that MS Exchange, Active Directory and MS SQL will are backed up in a transactionally consistent state.
New features in Nakivo Backup and Replication 9.1 beta
- Tape backup – Tape libraries and tape drives are fully supported, natively. You can control multiple tape libraries from a single dashboard, simplifying protection of your data.
- Linux Server backup – This is a big feature as was Backup of Windows servers. Now you can backup both physical and virtual Linux Servers in application-aware mode using scripts, ensuring consistency of application data.
- Instant verification – Backup verification was one of the more popular features which are present in the product for a long time. Now, they have updated that feature. They call it Instant verification. To verify the recoverability of backups and replicas you can enable Screenshot verification or Boot verification. The screenshot verification can test-recover the VM right after job completion, creates a screenshot of the booted OS and then discard that VM and send you an email with the screenshot.
Conclusion
Nakivo will now become feature complete and ready for the enterprises. Backup to tape is important as it can save the company in the darkest days. In addition, as the usage of Linux servers is on the rise, having great support for Linux is a necessity these days. Hats down to Nakivo, waiting for a final release. In the meantime, you can download a beta, test the product and earn $20. Maybe you didn’t know, but Nakivo has a great beta program where users can test the beta products and earn some cash by doing so. How cool is that? Additionally, you can download a free trial version and test the product yourself. It just may be the backup product you have been looking for for so long.
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