Road to Recovery

EMC’s announcement on accelerating your backup efficiency hits some very important concepts to help users make significant progress in solving some key backup challenges.

A lot has been said over the last 18 months regarding an inflection point, where the growth of data is out pacing the capabilities of traditional backup technologies.  This has driven the ‘one size does not fit all’ belief when it comes to backup technology for your infrastructure.  Vendors talk about utilizing new technologies such as disk based backup, VTL (virtual tape libraries), deduplication and data protection management in order to improve the backup process.  While each of these technologies can help to improve the process, customers need to act faster in order catch up with the growth of data.

It’s not to say run out and buy one of each of these technologies and collectively they will solve your all your backup challenges.  The first and perhaps the most important thing is to assess your backup environment.  The reason there is not a one size fits all policy when it comes to backup is because different data types behave differently with different backup technologies.  Data deduplication is great, but it can work much better when it is applied in the proper manner.  A combination of source and target deduplication can complement one another to maximize your backup efficiency.  As an example, by leveraging source based deduplication for the proper data in your environment can give you a significant number of cycles back to your traditional backup software and improve performance on data types that aren’t a good fit for source based deduplication.  So the message is, use assessment services to help you gain a realistic understanding of your data profile that allows you to choose the right deduplication for your environment.  Additionally, make sure the tools that you use to understand your deduplication efficiency utilize similar algorithms as the products you will use in your environment so there are no surprises.

Once you have a better understanding of the data types and data profile in your environment, the next message is to accelerate the use of data deduplication technologies that will allow you to best protect all of the data in your environment as efficiently as possible. Invest wisely.

 Another important thing to point out from EMC’s announcement is the simplification of the data protection environment.  It may take multiple different technology components in order for IT to get their arms around their backup issues, but it shouldn’t be hard to acquire, deploy, leverage or manage these technologies.  EMC has invested quite a bit of money in their products in order to simplify this process.  One example is how EMC’s NetWorker product has the ability to manage traditional backup, source based backup (with the integration of Avamar), target based deduplication (with the integration of Disk Library), bare metal recovery (with the integration of Homebase) and the ability to meet all of your recovery point objectives with CDP and the integration of RecoverPoint.  Additionally, you can leverage Data Protection Advisor to actively monitor your entire backup environment and see the successes as well as the failures and make decisions faster on how to fix any issues.  The faster you know you have an issue, as well as what the issue is, the faster you can address it and address it the right way.

EMC has also made it easier to protect application environments.  EMC NetWorker now has source based deduplication capabilities for Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL as well as Oracle databases.  Through the integration with Microsoft VSS you have the opportunity to use hardware based clones of your application data and mount that data on a proxy system where data deduplicaton can run and not impact the production host.  Additionally, restores are seamless as you can recover data right to the original host as it is needed.  Protecting files is very important, but it’s usually the applications that run your business.  The ability to more effectively protect these applications ensures a higher degree of business success in the event of a system failure.

Finally, by leveraging an integrated data protection portfolio you can take your backup beyond and put yourself on the road to recovery.

Posted by Steve Kenniston