Traditional NetApp backups are expensive, complicated, and offer limited functionality. Zetta DataProtect for NetApp delivers cloud-based offsite backup, replication, and disaster recovery for NetApp filers at 70% lower cost.

NetApp filers are versatile and high-performance storage appliances. They're so reliable that it's easy to forget things can go wrong-like a fire, theft, or major storm.

What does $1,094 a month buy you from Microsoft Azure Online Backup? The answer is: 500GB of online storage, no platform support beyond Windows, extra charges to recover your data, and upgraded phone support – 4x higher overall costs and less functionality than alternative online backup solutions like Zetta.

Before buying more storage space it’s a good idea to make sure your existing space isn’t filled with redundant or old data – or hundreds of downloaded cat videos. Disk capacity is increasing and while prices continue to drop, those savings are offset by demands for new capacity to store more and larger files. Not only does this mean more primary disk space, but 2x that amount for backups.

Local and off-site Backup Combination. It's a best practice to have a combination of local and off-site backup. Typically you want to keep large files, like databases and system state file backups on-site. This enables a quick recovery of the latest version of these files and reduces downtime. It's the most practical if your available bandwidth limits how fast you can restore these large files over the wire.

When the local news starts reporting that a tropical storm or hurricane will make landfall near your town, do you know how to protect your company’s IT assets?

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the leading online storage service, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for your company’s backup or disaster recovery solution. Since using S3 for backup requires 3rd party backup software, deployment and configuration is complicated. Also, by the time you add up the costs to use S3, you may not be saving any meaningful amount of money.

Because companies depend on their IT infrastructure, they can’t wait hours or days for access to files from an offsite backup following a data disaster. This is especially true when the definition of a data disaster can be a pinky finger that accidentally deleted a client document, a server crash, or tornado that takes down a whole data center.

Each of the prospective SME IT customers that we talk to everyday has a unique environment, a unique set of data protection challenges, and operates within a unique business context. During these conversations, after we get past the initial questions about bandwidth (5-10Mbps at the least) and data size (1TB or more), the discussion moves toward finding the optimum way to do server backup in their unique context.

This post is about how traditional database backup products work and how Zetta’s new SQL server backup feature, which is part of our DataProtect solution, does the job in a distinctly different way. Both the solution and this post were created because finding a database backup solution for a medium-sized organization is painful.