How Backup Technology Works
To Backup Technology only employ the best technology to maintain their award winning solutions.
Connectivity
Backup Technology have multiple state of the art 1Gbps links into data centre sites located in Manchester and London. All links are via a Tier One service provider and are based on high performance resilient ring technologies. This ensures that if there is an outage within any part of the network, downtime or degradation is avoided.
“As a company we have invested heavily in the infrastructure and the team that supports it. This gives us capacity for today and scalability for the future. We pride ourselves on having one of the most adaptable and highly available networks in our sector, more investment is planned to continue this good work.”
Linking the two data centers in Manchester (where the main vaults reside) and London (where the mirrors reside) are multiple, resilient and dedicated private 1Gbps fibre links. These links are direct from one site to the other and are isolated from the internet as well as all internal networks. Backup Technology also offer bandwidth (to customers with links and data centers in the area of London) a faster connectivity than most internet based links would.
Infrastructure
In order to provide the best potential performance, service and availability Backup technology utilise high availability technologies. In addition to ensure load balancing and full failover should a fault arise on a device, Backup Technology employ a clustered active-active Watchguard firewall configuration. Furthermore redundant switches connect the network to ensure no single switch failure can cause outage.
To provide a stable and highly available platform for backups, Backup Technology have an N+1 Asigra configuration comprising of clusters of multiple backup nodes. This configuration includes load balancing, fail-over, increased performance and throughput in order to accomplish service backups
The storage solution behind the N+1s is a Bluearc Titan Cluster NAS, connected via fibre to multiple disk trays. Every element of the Bluearc NAS has redundant components in order to account for any hardware failure. These include multiple Titan NAS heads, redundant RAID controllers in all disk trays and redundant fibre connectivity across the board. All disks used in the setup are configured with either RAID 5 or RAID 6 multiple global hot spares ensuring no disk failure will affect any of the systems. Such features make the Bluearc NAS the most robust, high performance storage solution available.
Security
Security of data is of highest concern to Backup Technology. Data is fully encrypted before it leaves your site to guarantee complete security during transit and for the entire time it is stored in the backup vaults. This encryption also guarantees your data cannot be recovered by anyone other than the user. The data encryption is performed by the Asigra backup software using a key of your choice. These are DES, AES-128, AES-192 or AES-256 encryption suites. Encrypted data is transmitted via the internet (or other means) to the backup vaults.
When a restore is initiated data is transmitted back to the Asigra software on-site while still in its encrypted form. Once the data is back on your network the software will then decrypt the data back to its original format. For an additional layer of protection data stored in the main vaults in the Manchester is replicated to a secondary data centre in London through a dedicated 1Gbps fibre link. Such replication provides geographically separate storage in the unlikely event of a large scale disaster at the Manchester site.
All links into the Manchester Backup Technology data centre, including the private link between Manchester and London, are controlled by the active-active Watchguard firewall cluster to prevent unauthorised access. The firewalls are also monitored 24/7 for intrusion attempts. Furthermore, in addition to encryption of all data, all links to the data storage systems are secure connections to prevent interception of data even on the private networks.
The data centres are fully secure facilities and are manned 24/7 by dedicated on-site security staff. Access to the data centre is available only to security cleared Backup Technology personnel upon entering a rotating access code and presenting proof of ID.
