Enterprises now demand higher levels of automation, integration, simplicity, and scalability from every component deployed into their IT infrastructure and the integrated backup appliances found in the DCIG’s forthcoming Buyer’s Guide Editions that cover integrated backup appliances are a clear output of those expectations. Intended for organizations that want to protect applications and data and then keep it behind corporate fire walls, these backup appliances come fully equipped from both hardware and software perspectives to do so.
Once largely assembled and configured by either IT staff or value added resellers (VARs), integrated backup appliances have gone mainstream and are available for use in almost any size organization. By bundling together both hardware and software, large enterprises get the turnkey backup appliance solution that was just a few years ago primary reserved for smaller organizations. In so doing, large enterprises can eliminate the need to spend days, weeks, or even months they previously had to spend configuring and deploying these solutions into their infrastructure.
The evidence of the demand for backup appliances at all levels of the enterprise is made plain by the providers who bring them to market. Once the domain of providers such as STORServer and Unitrends, “software only” companies such as Commvault and Veritas have responded to the demand for turnkey backup appliance solutions with both now offering their own backup appliances under their respective brand names.
Commvault Backup Appliance
Veritas NetBackup Appliance
In so doing, any size organization may get any of the most feature rich enterprise backup software solutions on the market, whether it is IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (STORServer), Commvault (Commvault and STORServer), Unitrends or Veritas NetBackup, delivered to them as a backup appliance. Yet while traditional all-software providers have entered the backup appliance market, behind the scenes new business demands are driving further changes on backup appliances that organizations should consider as they contemplate future backup appliance acquisitions.
- First, organizations expect successful recoveries. A few years ago, the concept of all backup jobs completing successfully was enough to keep everyone happy and giving high-fives to one another. No more. organizations recognize that they have reliable backups residing on a backup appliance and these appliances may largely sit idle during off-backup hours. This gives the enterprise some freedom to do more with these backup appliances during these periods of time such as testing recoveries, recovering applications on the appliance itself, or even presenting these backup copies of data to other applications to use as sources for internal testing and development. DCIG found that a large number of backup appliances support one or more vCenter Instant Recovery features and the emerging crop of backup appliances can also host virtual machines and recover applications on them.
- Second, organizations want greater visibility into their data to justify business decisions. The amount of data residing in enterprise backup repositories is staggering. Yet the lack of value that organizations derive from that stored data combined with the potential risk it presents to them by retaining it is equally staggering. Features that provide greater visibility into the metadata of these backups which then analyze it and help turn it into measurable value for the business are already starting to find their way onto these appliances. Expect these features to become more prevalent in the years to come.
- Third, enterprises want backup appliances to expand their value proposition. Backup appliances are already easy to deploy but maintaining and upgrading them over time or deploying them for other use cases gets more complicated over time. To address these concerns, emerging providers such as Cohesity, which is making its first appearance in DCIG Buyer’s Guides as an integrated backup appliance, directly addresses these concerns. Available as a scale-out backup appliance that can function as a hybrid cloud backup appliance, a deduplicating backup appliance and/or as an integrated backup appliance, it provides an example of how an enterprises can more easily scale and maintain it over time while giving them the flexibility to use it internally in multiple different ways.
The forthcoming DCIG 2016-17 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide Editions highlight the most robust and feature rich integrated backup appliances available on the market today. As such, organizations should consider these backup appliances covered in these Buyer’s Guides as having many of the features they need to protect both their physical and virtual environments. Further, a number of these appliances give them early access to the set of features that will position them to meet their next set of recovery challenge,s satisfy rising expectations for visibility into their corporate data, and simplify their ongoing management so they may derive additional value from it.