When it comes to the mix of data protection challenges that exist within enterprises today, these companies would love to identify a single product that they can deploy to solve all their challenges. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that single product solution does not yet exist. That said, enterprises will find a steadily improving ecosystem of products that increasingly work well together to address this challenge with HPE being at the forefront of putting up a big tent that brings these products together and delivers them as a single solution.
Having largely solved their backup problems at scale, enterprises have new freedom to analyze and address their broader enterprise data protection challenges. As they look to bring long term data retention, data archiving, and multiple types of recovery (single applications, site fail overs, disaster recoveries, and others) under one big tent for data protection, they find they often need to deploy multiple products.
This creates a situation where each product addresses specific pain points that enterprises have. However, multiple products equate to multiple management interfaces that each have their own administrative policies with minimal or no integration between them. This creates a thornier problem – enterprises are left to manage and coordinate the hand-off of the protection and recovery of data between these different individual data protection products.
A few years HPE started to build a “big tent” to tackle these enterprise data protection and recovery issues. It laid the foundation with its HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays, StoreOnce deduplication storage systems, and Recovery Manager Central (RMC) software to help companies coordinate and centrally manage:
- Snapshots on 3PAR StoreServ arrays
- Replication between 3PAR StoreServ arrays
- The efficient movement of data between 3PAR and StoreOnce systems for backup, long term retention, and fast recoveries
This week HPE expanded its big tent of data protection to give companies more flexibility to protect and recover their data more broadly across their enterprise. It did so in the following ways:
- HPC RMC 6.0 can directly recover data to HPE Nimble storage arrays. Recoveries from backups can be a multi-step process that may require data to pass through the backup software and the application server before it lands on the target storage array. Beginning December 2018, companies can use RMC to directly recover data to HPE Nimble storage arrays from an HPE StoreOnce system without going through the traditional recovery process just as they can already do to HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays.
- HPE StoreOnce can directly send and retrieve deduplicated data from multiple cloud providers. Companies sometimes fail to consider that general purpose cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure make no provisions to optimize data stored with them such as deduplicating it. Using HP StoreOnce’s new direct support for AWS, Azure, and Scality, companies can use StoreOnce to first compress and deduplicate data before they store the data in the cloud.
- Integration between Commvault and HPE StoreOnce systems. Out of the gate, companies can use Commvault to manage StoreOnce operations such as replicating data between StoreOnce systems as well as moving data directly from StoreOnce systems to the cloud. Moreover, as this relationship between Commvault and HPE matures, companies will also be able to use HPE’s StoreOnce Catalyst, HPE’s client-based deduplication software agent, in conjunction with Commvault to backup data on server clients where data may not reside on HPE 3PAR or Nimble storage. Using the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst software, Commvault will deduplicate data on the source before sending it to an HPE StoreOnce system.
Source:HPE
Of these three announcements that HPE made this week, this new relationship with Commvault that accompanies its pre-existing relationships with Micro Focus (formerly HPE Data Protector) and Veritas demonstrate HPE’s commitment to helping enterprises build a big tent for their data protection and recovery initiatives. Storing data on the HPE 3PAR and Nimble and using RMC to manage their backups and recoveries on the StoreOnce systems certainly accelerates and simplifies these functions when companies can do so. But by working with these other partners, it illustrates that HPE recognizes that companies will not store all their data on its systems and that HPE will accommodate companies so they can create a single, larger data protection and recovery solution for their enterprise.