Road to Recovery

The Architecture

This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.

This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things.  It can help you begin to classify your data and align your  data to your business objectives.  It also lets you begin to identify what data or data services in your environment that may be more important to you than others and based on this help you to choose areas you may want to outsource or move to the cloud.

As you can tell, there really is not one solution for meeting all your data protection needs.  The challenge comes with managing multiple solutions in an effort to meet your business objectives.  While there are only a few technologies available that allow you to manage your environment across all your RPOs and RTOs, it is important that I point out EMC’s NetWorker is able to do this, centralizing your data protection infrastructure  for ease of management.  It allows you to manage traditional backup, source based deduplicated backup with Avamar, CDP with RecoverPoint, as well as the EMC disk libraries and tape where the data is stored.  Now, I am not saying that NetWorker solves all of your data protection challenges, nor am I suggesting that replacing one traditional backup technology for another is the right answer, but what I am saying is that if you’re looking to have all the feature functionality required to meet all your business objectives and you want easier management, NetWorker is one avenue to get you there.  Additionally, the underlying image of the triangle represents data protection management.  Putting all the new technology in place is one thing, managing it, and ensuring you are now meeting your business needs is another.  EMC’s Data Protection Advisor can help here as well.

This diagram can help customers layout a new, better data protection schema for their environment and start thinking about data protection a bit more strategically versus tactically.  It can also help vendors speak to customers about how they should look at their environment in order to identify specific challenges and the means they need to alleviate these challenges , taking backup, beyond.

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Our domain, Backup & Beyond was the tagline for Avamar Technologies, a company EMC acquired in November of 2006.  This tagline was very fitting from a data protection standpoint because Avamar utilized a traditional client / server architecture to protect data but with a twist.  Avamar utilizes a more intelligent client side agent that provides source based, variable block deduplication to enable the most efficient backups available in the market for more than 80% of a data centers data.  Avamar also leverages this same technology to replicate this data between disk based backup targets there by dramatically reducing the reliance on tape.  This new technology, that has enabled new processes is taking backup beyond.

The title of our blog, Road to Recovery – well, like every good title it is a play on words and trust me, as with every title it took us a while to come up with it.  That said, the industry has been talking about the fact that backup is really about recovery.  The same can be said for other data protection tools.  This is why our goal is to talk about methodologies (technologies and processes) that help you to recover data.  When IT professionals are polled, they often say that data protection (backup) is still the number one issue they have in the data center.  We say it is time to stepup and admit it and start the ‘Road to Recovery’ when it comes to your data protection environment.

Let us know what your challengs are, we are here for you, your support system and we welcome you comments and questions.

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