Backup and Archive
The data assets are the crown jewels of studios and cannot afford to be lost. Cloud-Enabled Studios equips studios with powerful backup solution for Perforce and anyDrive data recovery in the event of loss or corruption, as well as archiving solution for long-term retention at low cost.
Archives and backups are two IT terms often to be heard interchangeably, and many people think they are one and the same. In fact, they are separate processes that can actually improve one another. As far as the fundamental difference between backups and archives is concerned, backup helps with data recovery in the event of recent data loss or corruption or hardware failure. Archives, on the other hand, serve the dual purposes of long-term retention and space management.
The main goal of backup is to provide for recovering data from hardware failure, data corruption, or other loss.In other words, data backups provide protection against the unexpected. You hope you never need them, but if you don’t have them, you won't be prepared for critical disruptions hence could face significant loss of time and money.
Many game studios heavily rely on Perforce for asset management and version control, making it extremely important to ensure data in Perforce is promptly and safely backed up. Other important data managed outside of Perforce requires corresponding backup strategy. It's also important to make plans for fast data recovery to ensure business continuity in case of incidents or disasters.
Typically, backups are made regularly or when the original data changes. The original file is preserved, while older backups (iterations) are deleted in favor of newer backups.
Data archiving is a solution for storing data for long periods of time. It helps you manage space limitations and long-term data retention.
Game studios have great amount of data generated every single day. It keeps growing and taking storage spaces, which is a huge burden on hot-tier storage systems and incur more cost. Archiving infrequently accessed data to colder tier storage, typically cloud object storage, would maintain storage system health and low cost.
After an archive copy is made and stored, the original data may or may not be deleted from the source system,though it’s common for the archive to be the only copy of the data.
It’s clear that a backup and an archive serve different purposes. Do game studios need both? The wise choice is yes since game studios are data and storage-heavy businesses. Consider the business reasons for choosing both data storage methods:
Among many of our products aimed at boosting productivity and reducing cost for game studios, P4Anywhere is a global distributed, fully managed,security hardened Perforce system that offloads Perforce daily operation and maintenance from studio admins. P4Anywhere leverages industry-leading cloud service providers' durability to deliver a 99.99% uptime. Hourly and weekly snapshots come by default, with options for high availability server pairs, geographically-redundant backups, and managed automated p4 checkpoints to ensure the highest levels of data integrity.
P4Anywhere follows Perforce best practices and takes care of all the nitty-gritty details of backup and archiving operations, including but not limited to:
All you need to do is configure backup and archiving policies within the Cloud-Enabled Studios web portal, the rest is taken care of by automation and the Cloud-Enabled Studios Perforce experts.
P4Anywhere also offers:
P4Anywhere, Perforce Insight and Perforce Booster are all built on top of Cloud-Enabled Studios team's rich experience in serving world class AAA game studios. Cloud-Enabled Studios is also an honored and trusted partner of Perfoce.
For many game studios, there is a lot of data that is not managed under Perforce, but still bear great importance. Studios may use different technologies to manage the data, such as local NAS, cloud storage. There are many estalished companies in this area that studios can choose from, but they are often very expensive, leading to high TCO and low ROI.
Cloud-Enabled Studios offers a high-speed cross-region file transfer and sharing product anyDrive, which combines cloud storage for intra-region sharing and inter-region data replication, with a powerful and lightweight client app offering great user experience.
With anyDrive, large amount of data can be transferred and shared across very long distance with high speed, greatly improving global collaboration productivity. For example, a 100GB game build can be transferred from Europe to North America or China within 30 minutes. At the same time, anyDrive can be used as a network drive to store any type of data among users regardless of where they are located. A typical use case is a shared audio/video/asset library between artists and teams. By using cloud object storage as backend, there is no limit of file size and amount. Furthermore, anyDrive provides two built-in features to facilitate backup and archiving.
Snapshots
Managed Archiving
With the built-in snapshots and archiving features, anyDrive offers a more economic way for backup and archiving compared to third-party products that are often more expensive.
The task of backing up your data will only become larger as the amount of data your studio produces grows each year. For a backup and archiving service that won’t impact studio operations with the data-heavy game projects—let Cloud-Enabled Studios handle backing up and archiving your Perforce and all kinds of important data. Scale up with right tools and services for your growing needs.
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