How We Do It

Nine Technology’s Powered By Nine® online backup and recovery platforms enjoy a collection of several critical technological features. These advantages, which can only be utilized in this manner through the Powered By Nine® system, allow Nine Technology’s partners to protect significant amounts of data with minimal impact on bandwidth and on the back-end architecture.

Among the most valuable aspects of the Powered By Nine® solutions is the Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (R.A.I.N.) on which the system is based. R.A.I.N.-based data protection architectures boast of superior reliability. R.A.I.N.-based solutions let the online backup provider grow their data center easily and painlessly. Nodes can be added and data redistributed, making R.A.I.N.-based architectures truly scalable. Although most corporations protect only several terabytes of data, the R.A.I.N. platform can support zettabytes (think trillions of gigabytes) of information.

Another major feature that Powered By Nine® solutions boast of is the two-stage block-level global deduplication algorithm. This deduplication algorithm has reduced the back-end impact of a corporation’s data by a factor of ten in testing. In layman’s terms, this process breaks files down into blocks, checks all of the blocks on an individual workstation or server for duplicates, checks the unique blocks against the entire back-end for duplicates, and then sends only globally unique blocks to the data center for protection. The benefits of this trickle down all the way to the end-user, who spends less time protecting files and worrying about bandwidth and more time with full system resources available.

The third Powered By Nine® technological benefit lies within its true incremental-forever backup policies. Unlike some other providers who require full system backups every several weeks or months, Powered By Nine®’s platform never needs to start over. Every backup cycle after the first one examines the protected files for changes, checks those changes against the blocks on the back-end, and then protects only those new blocks. Daily backups can be quick and painless with incremental-forever backup policies.

But even those initial backups can be long, sometimes lasting weeks in the case of businesses protecting terabytes of data. That’s an awfully-long time to devote bandwidth and system resources to a backup process. Nine Technology recognizes that weeks of continuous backup may be unacceptable, and we’ve come up with a solution: cloud-seeding. Nine Technology’s partnership with Imation joins two superior technologies together to create the most efficient online backup and recovery model available. Large businesses can export their initial backup to several Imation RDX drives and ship them to Nine Technology, who will in turn offload that initial backup data to the data center. From then on, only incremental backups need be taken.