Category: DCIG Sponsored Analysis

O’Reilly School of Technology does what many organizations now do when daily backing up its production data: it uses array-based snapshots on its NAS filer. However its internal policies call for it to copy each set of weekly or monthly array-based snapshots to another storage media (disk or tape) for long term data retention and offsite protection.

Ready or not, here comes the cloud and, for many organizations, backup to the cloud is squarely in their sights. However backup to the cloud does not mean they should abandon the best of what today’s localized backup processes have to offer. By instead taking a hybrid approach to cloud backup such as what Western Digital (WD®) offers, they can get on a secure path to storing data in the cloud without breaking either their backup processes or their budget.

Ask any business owner or IT administrator how much storage they will need in a few years and they will likely hem and haw trying to come up with a reasonable answer. Ask them to share their true feelings and they will in all likelihood respond, “I don’t know.” The good news is that storage architectures are now available that take the risk out of this uncertainty and that do not require yet another expensive, disruptive and risky forklift upgrade.

Mixed physical and virtual IT infrastructures and the protection of them are now a reality in enterprises of almost every size. But with these environments now in place, enterprises are turning their attention to using either a single product or interface to manage data protection across all of it. Quest’s Software’s release of NetVault Backup 9.0 gives them two paths to follow to arrive at this common centralized data protection management destination.

Enterprise backup has changed significantly in the last decade with disk-based backup and deduplication contributing largely to that shift. But as array-based snapshots emerge as the next big wave in how data protection is done, organizations should not assume that a choice between array-based snapshots and disk-based backup looms. Rather, array-based snapshots and disk-based backup are complementary technologies that change the decision from being “one or the other” to “how to make them work better together.”

Feature rich storage systems grab most of the headlines but when many organizations are pressed as to what features they really want a storage system to possess, their answer is simple. They want a Worry-free storage system that is reliable and easy to manage. In this third and final blog entry in my interview with NetApp VP Dave Mooney, he reveals what features contribute to making a storage system “Worry-free” and why having a reliable storage system “that just works” is so valuable to organizations today.

To say “All virtual machine (VM) backup software is the same” is like saying “All birds can fly.” While VM backup software solutions can and certainly do protect VMs, the techniques they use, what hypervisors they support and how they manage backup and recovery vary greatly between them. Understanding and quantifying these differences becomes especially important for those organizations looking to select the best solution to protect the growing number of VMs in their environment.

To date, backup has been largely driven by a single business objective: creating a recoverable copy of data. But as business service level agreements (SLAs) continue to demand ever shorter application recovery times, creating backups – even if they are good backups – without having any visibility into expected recovery times is simply not enough. Now, the requirements of physical and virtual application recovery must align with these heightened business expectations.

The objective of storage systems shipping today is to deliver more business value while minimizing IT management. As simple as that sounds, delivering on that promise is much more complicated than first meets the eye. Today I continue a conversation with NetApp VP Dave Mooney as we look at how features previously only found in $100,000+ storage systems are finding their way into sub-$20K E-series storage systems in order to make them worry-free from a management perspective.