Conventional Network Shares or Home Directory servers, whether located on an enterprise NAS array or a Microsoft Windows based fileserver are expensive to manage and are increasingly out of date in a world of laptops and mobile users. Additionally, managing these legacy home directory servers can be a real headache for IT Administrators, as there are a slew of problems:
- Capacity management: Home Directories tend to keep running out of capacity, as users view it as an unlimited storage resource, burdening IT with having to constantly send emails to clean up.
- Poor performance: slow response time under heavy load adversely affects the productivity of end users.
- Single point of failure: Home Directories can be a single point of failure if they go down – bringing the entire end-user population to a grinding halt.
- Expensive backup infrastructure: Companies have to devote expensive backup and replication infrastructure in order to prevent home directory servers from becoming a single point of failure. Some estimates show that the TCO of managing a home directory server can run as high as $3-$4 per GB/month.
- No self-service recovery: Without a self-service recovery option, end users have to call IT to recover files.
- Unsuitability for disconnected users: Laptop and mobile users wanting to work “disconnected” have stopped storing data on Home Directories and are storing it locally on the C: drive – where it is unprotected.
Home Directory 2.0: Consolidating Network Shares
Despite the issues associated with Home Directories, companies continue to spend money on acquiring and protecting legacy Home Directory storage while Terabytes of free storage lies unused on the thousands of PCs throughout the company.
The Copiun Solution provides an alternative approach that enables businesses to free up expensive primary and secondary storage infrastructure dedicated to network Home Directories by enabling end users to store data directly on their PCs without worrying about its safety and accessibility. IT simply defines policies which ensure that end user data on PCs is continuously protected without requiring any user action. There are several benefits to this approach including:
- Infrastructure savings – reducing or eliminating the expensive backup and replication infrastructure in order to prevent home directory servers from becoming a single point of failure.
- Improved performance – eliminates issues relating to slow response time under heavy load.
- Improved data accessibility - enables end users to access their data from anywhere using a web browser, even from their Smartphone.
- Self-Service Recovery - provides a remarkably simple self-service recovery option which is integrated into existing end user tools like Windows Explorer and Windows Search.
- Improved Compliance – ALL user data is backed up and accounted for, including laptops.
- No single point of failure – using the free storage on all corporate PCs in conjunction with Copiun’s Solution eliminates the Home Directory server as a single point of failure.
- Reduced administrative burden – achieved as a result of both the significantly reduced burden on the infrastructure and the seamless self-service recovery.
Historically, companies have been wary of storing data on PCs because few solutions existed to protect the data stored on PCs. However, the Copiun solution enables companies to protect data stored on PCs with an efficient and straightforward client that integrates directly into the operating system. Click here to learn more about Copiun's desktop and laptop backup solution.