More companies than ever want to use the cloud as part of their overall IT strategy. To do so, they often look to achieve some quick wins in the cloud to demonstrate its value. Achieving these quick wins also serves to give them some practical hands on experience in the cloud. Incorporating the cloud into your backup and disaster recovery (DR) processes may serve as the best way to get these wins.
The shift is on toward using cloud service providers for an increasing number of production IT functions with backup and DR often at the top of the list of the tasks that companies first want to deploy in the cloud. But as IT staff seeks to “Check the box” that they can comply with corporate directives to have a cloud solution in place for backup and DR, they also need to simultaneously check the “Simplicity,” “Cost-savings,” and “It Works” boxes.
For an HCI solution to not have a clear path forward for public cloud support is almost anathema in the increasingly hybrid cloud environments found in today’s enterprises. That’s what makes this week’s CloudShift announcement from Datrium notable – it begins to clarify Datrium’s strategy for how Datrium is going to go beyond backup to the public cloud as part of its DVX solution and puts the concept of flawless DR on corporate radar screens.
Business are finally adopting public cloud because a large and rapidly growing catalog of services is now available from multiple cloud providers. These two factors have many implications for businesses. This article addresses four of these implications plus several cloud-specific risks.
One of the more perplexing challenges that Nutanix administrators face is how to protect the data in their Nutanix deployments. Granted, Nutanix natively offers its own data protection utilities. However, these utilities leave gaps that enterprises are unlikely to find palatable when protecting their production applications. This is where Comtrade Software’s HYCU and ExaGrid come into play as their combined solutions provide a more affordable and elegant approach to protecting Nutanix environments.
No business – and I mean no business – regardless of its size ever wants to experience an outage for any reason or duration. However, to completely avoid outages means spending money and, in most cases, a lot of money. That is why, when someone shared with me earlier this week, that one of their clients has put in place a solution that keeps their period of downtime to what appears as a ‘glitch’ to their end-users for nominal cost, it struck a chord with me.
The phrase “Cloud Data Protection Appliance” is included in the name of DCIG’s forthcoming Buyer’s Guide but the end game of each appliance covered in that Guide is squarely on recovery. While successful recoveries have theoretically always been the objective of backup appliances, vendors too often only paid lip service to that ideal as most of their new product features centered on providing better means for doing backups. Recent technology advancements have flipped this premise on its head.
DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of the 2016-17 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide developed from the backup appliance body of research. As core business processes become digitized, the ability to keep services online and to rapidly recover from any service interruption becomes a critical need. Given the growth and maturation of cloud services, many organizations are exploring the advantages of storing application data with cloud providers and even recovering applications in the cloud.
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.
Evaluating product features, comparing prices, and doing proofing of concepts are important steps in the process of adopting almost any new product. But once one completes those steps, the time arrives to start to roll the product out and implement it. In this second installment of my interview series with System Architect, Fidel Michieli, he shares how his company gained a comfort level with Cohesity for backup and disaster recovery (DR) and how broadly it decided to deploy the product in the primary and secondary data centers.
Thank you for your interest in DCIG research and analysis.
Please sign up for the free DCIG Newsletter to have new analysis delivered to your inbox each week.
