Tier 3-4
The least expensive protection for your data-centric applications
These are the lowest tiers and are for your non-critical systems. A simple test: Are you more concerned about protecting the data or making sure the application never goes down? Nearly every business has several systems that they can afford to live without for a day or more.
For example, your HR system is important to your business, but if you weren’t able to access it for a little while, it doesn’t mean you have to close the doors.
Basically, your focus on Tier 3 and 4 systems is on protecting the data itself. In technical terms, we would say that your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a lot more important than your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
For Tier 3 and 4 systems, Neverfail recommends a comprehensive backup and recovery system that will protect the data, no matter what happens to your offices or your computers. But – and this is an important but – you won’t spend a dollar more than you have to in order to achieve that. Tiers 3 and 4 are your least expensive options and you’ll want to use that for as many systems as possible.
Keep in mind, though, that it may take several hours – as long as working day – to bring systems protected at the Tier 3 or 4 level back up.
What’s the Difference Between Tier 3 and Tier 4?
Tier 3: Backup for data-centric applications
Data-centric backup solutions utilizing a second location (yours or a cloud provider for example) is generally sufficient for Tier 3 applications. Neverfail recommends Veeam Backup & Replication for this tier, back ended by a Neverfail HybriStor appliance – market leading deduplication and compression technology that is a Veeam Ready certified storage repository.
It’s perfect for applications that are not that critical to your operation, but that you need to be able to access fairly quickly — within less than a day or two — in the event of a disaster or major outage. The Veeam solution allows flexibility in meeting these demands, as well as any retention requirements for compliance or otherwise, and HybriStor ensures scale and speed of recovery with an average of 8-10X less data needing to be stored on disk and the ability to instantly restore without going through a lengthy rehydration process.
Tier 4: Archive for long term data storage
Think of Tier 4 as cold storage. This is the least expensive way to protect archival data that you might not ever need to access again. For example, you may want to protect compliance-based retention data from years ago with Tier 4. If, for any reason, you do need to get at those old records, the data will always be available and you’ll be spending as little as possible to ensure that.
