For an online backup system to meet your backup window and recovery time objectives, assessing and smartly using available bandwidth is a key factor. Determining available bandwidth is relatively easy (see the test on the main page). How a particular backup system uses the available bandwidth, however, can have a dramatic effect on the
required bandwidth.
- How much data does your backup generate? Is it a full backup? Is it an incremental backup?
- How intelligent is the software about minimizing the amount of data to transfer for incremental backups?
- Does the system provide acceleration? De-duplication? Throttling?
Zetta Data Protect with the ZettaMirror agent provides many features for bandwidth usage optimization:
- ZettaMirror maintains a local record of file changes and only updates those portions of a file that have changed.
- ZettaMirror aggressively utilizes multi-threading (transferring multiple files at the same time) to maximize the utilization of the available bandwidth (within any throttling limits specified).
- Backup data at Zetta is immediately accessible via either a web browser or mounted directly from a remote server, eliminating the requirement for a long restore/transfer before access.