EMC BACKUP AND ARCHIVE

EMC BACKUP AND ARCHIVE

GAME PLAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................3 1. TODAY’S CHALLENGES.............................................................................................3 2. MARKET DYNAMICS CHANGING BACKUP AND ARCHIVE...............................................5 3. END-USER EXPECTATIONS ARE CHANGING.................................................................5 4. FOCUS ON BACKUP: TECHNOLOGY TRENDS DRIVING THE MARKET...............................6

Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part I: Impacting the Velocity of Business..............6

5. WHAT DOES BACKUP TRANSFORMATION LOOK LIKE?..................................................7

One Size Does Not Fit All..............................................................................................7



Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part II: Next-Generation Backup............................7

6. BUILDING INTENTION—NOT ACCIDENTAL—ARCHITECTURES........................................8 7. PROTECTION STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DEFINED.........................................................8 8. FROM BLUEPRINT TO REALITY: BUILDING YOUR OWN GAME PLAN ...............................9 The Backup Window..................................................................................................10 9. REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES OF TRANSFORMATION....................................................... 12 10. BACKUP AND ARCHIVE—AND THE JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD....................................... 13

Alliance Trust PLC on EMC Avamar—VMware................................................................... 13



Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part III: Empowering the Backup Team................13

11. GETTING STARTED WITH BACKUP............................................................................ 13

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INTRODUCTION Get Your Game On It used to be that an organization’s biggest data protection challenge was making sure backup jobs were completed within allotted windows of time. While backup and recovery windows continue to drive organizational behavior and even vendor innovation, new business expectations are changing the scope and the urgency of the discussions organizations are having with internal teams. Instead of just thinking about backup and archive in terms of familiar IT “speeds and feeds,” organizations are looking at them from a broader business perspective: • How is my backup plan affecting my pace of virtualization adoption and application deployment? • How is it affecting my journey to the cloud? • What does this mean in business terms? • What about cost savings and competitive advantage? — And what about archive? • Can I meet discovery requests? • Can I support various content types? • Will I be able to remain compliant as data volumes grow? • How will this affect my pace of business? The simple truth is that backup and archive can slow down business. Despite great advances in backup and archive technologies, including disk backup and deduplication, in most organizations, data protection and the backup process is still very broken. However, by transforming the backup and archive environment—the people, the process, and the infrastructure they comprise—organizations can tackle IT issues that directly affect the speed of their businesses. What’s Your Plan? Organizations that transform data protection environments report significant business benefits. In fact, they directly link backup and archive transformation to faster product development cycles, accelerated global expansion efforts, improvements in customer profiling, etc., and this drives revenue. But how do you go about making changes to your data protection backup environment that will improve your business? You’ve got to have a game plan. This eBook is designed to help you understand the impact of backup and archive transformation, what the key steps are that all organizations should consider before and during the journey, and why EMC—as the market leader in this space—is uniquely qualified to guide you.

1. TODAY’S CHALLENGES Meeting backup and archive objectives is a significant challenge. An expanding set of applications, shrinking recovery times, heightened sensitivity to data loss, changing archive and eDiscovery requirements, as well as changing business environments continually put pressure on IT organizations. Most are realizing that traditional backup and archive solutions, which are based on tape and physical data center realities, cannot help in achieving objectives. Smarter backup and archive is needed.

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Challenges of traditional approaches include: • Slow recoveries—whether onsite from tape or offsite via truck • Unreliable recoveries—no assurance of completeness or accuracy • Inefficient—provides no capability to reduce media required • High effort—significant manual intervention to administer most tape-related processes • High risk—losing unencrypted tapes during transportation to and from offsite locations • High cost/poor scalability—associated with maintaining backup and archive silos Further destabilizing today’s situation are three big trends that are irreversibly changing how organizations must think about backup and archive: Massive Data Growth

Data is exploding with a forecasted 50x growth rate over this decade. Since backup creates copies of important data, backup storage requirements, using traditional approaches, can consume 5-10x more capacity than the primary storage that’s being protected. IT budgets, as well as data center power, cooling, and floor space, simply cannot accommodate this type of data growth. Studies have also shown that traditional backup is only 80 percent successful and recovery just 70 percent. Massive data growth will make it even more difficult and costly to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). This data growth is also dictating changes in archive process and infrastructure, including the need for a consolidated backup and archive environment. IT Budget Dilemma

Source: Forrester Research, Inc., IT Budget Allocations: Planning For 2011, December 3, 2010

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IT organizations are spending 73 percent of budgets to maintain existing legacy infrastructure and applications, but want more of it to be spent on investment for the future—to drive business. Traditional backup and archive derails that goal. It has become too complicated— with operating costs accounting for 58 percent of data protection expenses. Tapebased backup solutions are particularly costly to maintain—requiring specialized staff for media management, storage, and shipping. A recent report of organizations found that new data centers are being designed and built smaller but will support 300 percent more workloads. Traditional backup and recovery cannot support this trend—it requires more data-center footprint and more administration.

Virtualization and the Cloud Simply put, traditional data protection will slow down your IT transformation efforts. Virtual servers are now more pervasive than physical servers for running applications. But concerns with backup of virtual environments often stall cloud projects, where resource contention on highly utilized servers dramatically slows backups. In one survey, companies currently using virtualization cite “completing backups on time” as a key challenge, and more than one-third of respondents identified improving the backup and recovery of virtual machines as a key area of focus. Likewise, your architecture can limit your organization’s ability to meet new archive and eDiscovery demands, which can have costly business consequences.

2. MARKET DYNAMICS CHANGING BACKUP AND ARCHIVE The world in which we are living is becoming increasingly data-centric. The numbers are shocking. By 2020, IDC estimates there will be 35 zetabytes of information out there. And all this data is putting more and more pressure on IT teams to transform their environments. In fact, limitations of traditional backup and archive environments are causing IT to commit unnatural acts: • Application owners are scaling back the size of databases • VMware® administrators are making smaller virtual machines • CIOs are putting off, rather than expanding, virtualization plans And they’re doing this because they don’t trust that their backup environments can protect their data. Backup teams have hit a wall. They can’t get backups done efficiently, they can’t meet backup windows, and they can’t ensure timely recoveries. They can’t do more without putting data at risk, and this is undermining trust.

WHAT IS “TIME TO”? Whether it’s the time to spin up a new application, the time to reach 80 percent virtualization, the time to analyze a set of complex data, or the time to perform an eDiscovery request, the goal is to be as close to zero as possible. A low time means a business, or IT environment, is adaptive and agile. Key processes, such as backup and archive, should be automated and seamless, allowing organizations to grow businesses.

In the case of virtualization, this means businesses are either getting the return on investment (ROI) of virtualization on a much smaller set of applications than they had expected or they’re getting a much lower ROI across a broader set of applications. Either way, it’s a losing proposition that constrains business growth. Backup is to blame, and it’s time for it to step up. The story is similar with archive. Archiving is more than moving inactive content. It’s about being compliant and meeting discovery requests—no matter where files live. Whether it’s inactive content in primary storage or inactive content not yet “in an archive,” organizations need to be able to index and manage it, recover files as needed, and scale environments quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. Archive is broken, and it’s time to fix it.

3. END-USER EXPECTATIONS ARE CHANGING A sociological or cultural shift—more so than anything technological—is driving the notion of IT as a service provider. End-user expectations have changed dramatically over the past decade. IT used to be an intimidating “black box” and end users accepted whatever limitations IT departments imposed; they lacked the confidence to challenge IT to do more for them. But all that’s changed. End users today are savvy. They understand what’s available in the consumer space and what’s possible with the right IT infrastructure. They understand the transformative benefits IT can have on their businesses. This means the bar is a lot higher, for IT in general and backup and archive in particular. End users—the lines of business—expect that when they want something done, it is done. And they expect the “time to” do it to be near zero.

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Whether it’s the manufacturing arm of a large company, the IT departments at financial institutions, or the backup administrator at a small business, the numberone reason for an unsatisfactory “time to” is almost universally due to backup. It’s the one part of the IT environment that still requires someone to pick up the phone and call someone to get things done, and this increases the “time to.” The greater the “time to,” the greater the potential for negative business impact. The simple, hard truth is that backup and archive architectures are slowing everybody down. Take backup. With VMware and virtualized storage, a line of business can provision a new virtual machine (VM) without calling IT—that is, until it comes time to protect it. To do this, they have to call the backup team to get a client installed, to set the backup policy, to connect to the right backup network, and to ensure there’s enough backup capacity to support the job. Recovery is even more complex. Businesses go from driving 75 mph down the freeway to a near standstill. Backup is the bottleneck and this must change.

4. FOCUS ON BACKUP: TECHNOLOGY TRENDS DRIVING THE MARKET Although demands on IT have never been greater, it’s really the same three technology trends that continue to drive the backup market as they have for the past five-plus years:

For web-enabled viewers: Video: Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part I: Impacting the Velocity of Business

1. Deduplicated disk is displacing tape. 2. Everybody wants more control of their backups. They want to know their data is protected and they want to be able to continue to reduce the “time to” deliver value. 3. Backup and recovery windows continue to drive customer behavior and innovation. This is what organizations think about. They want to know how up-to-date their backups are and how quickly they can recover their data if they need to. Remember, data is king. These trends reflect today’s new service-type mentality. Organizations are looking to make IT transparent to the business and, to do this, they need to ensure they have the right IT infrastructures in place. From a backup perspective, deduplicated disk provides the flexible, scalable foundation to support this type of infrastructure. You could say deduplicated disk democratizes backup by eliminating the idiosyncrasies of tape interfaces that have made it difficult for non-experts to manage backups over the years. Deduplicated disk enables more layers in the software stack (e. g., hypervisor, application, and storage), which allows administrators of different types to drive their own backups and recoveries. This has a direct positive impact on backup and recovery windows and SLAs, and should really open the door to more—and better— innovation. Yes, backup and recovery windows continue to spur innovation in this industry, but the big difference today is that innovation is no longer just happening within IT departments and by backup vendors alone, but also by hypervisor, application, and storage vendors as well.

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5. WHAT DOES BACKUP TRANSFORMATION LOOK LIKE? One of the primary jobs of an IT organization is to provide end users with the infrastructure and services they need to continue to evolve their businesses, and this includes the backup environment. The trouble is traditional backup and recovery infrastructures fall short, lacking the flexibility, agility, and scale to support a services-oriented approach. What’s needed is a new architecture—one that is designed for a rapidly changing landscape, across people, process, and infrastructure. Think of it as an internal backup cloud or “protection cloud.”

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL Every journey is unique and every customer is different. Why would you expect one backup and archive solution to fit all? EMC’s Data Protection Suite allows the flexibility to start anywhere and go everywhere.

This type of environment gives end users and application owners the visibility and control of their data they require, plus it gives the data protection team the platform it needs to automate key tasks, federate management, and provide a rich set of value-added services to data owners. These services include things like centralized reporting, backup policy management, cataloging/indexing, and storage management (e. g., replication, encryption, and long-term retention). And, as with any service offerings, users can leverage different services depending on specific requirements and SLAs, such as: • A complete protection solution with integrated backup software and storage • Protection storage services to extend the life of legacy software backup infrastructure • Protection storage services for zero-touch backups (e. g., Oracle RMAN writing directly to protection storage)

For web-enabled viewers: Video: Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part II: Next-Generation Backup

While this type of architecture represents a new way of thinking and doing backup, it works with and within existing backup infrastructures; it doesn’t impose any onesize fits all lock on end users or application owners, and it doesn’t require organizations to rip and replace infrastructures. Rather, it gives organizations the freedom to use the mechanisms they are comfortable with while benefiting from a new centralized disk back end. Regardless of the level of services provided, this type of approach entices end users by delivering value versus trying to centralize backup via executive order.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH IS NEEDED

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6. BUILDING INTENTIONAL—NOT ACCIDENTAL— ARCHITECTURES Evolving data protection technology and expanding requirements have completely transformed the industry. Unfortunately, with such rapid change, many organizations have fallen into the chaos of an accidental architecture. The backup team isn’t solving critical protection performance challenges from the application, virtualization, and storage teams, so those teams deploy silos of point products and the accidental architecture results. It’s accidental because no organization or IT team would intentionally plan for a half-dozen unconnected protection tools with no central oversight and no cost controls. Organizations need a Protection Storage Architecture to combat the accidental architecture. This architecture should be composed of loosely coupled modules to minimize vendor lock-in while providing the value of integrated data protection. That way, the backup team can solve immediate challenges while delivering a platform that can evolve with business and technical requirements.

PROTECTION STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

What are the key challenges that the Protection Storage Architecture needs to address? 1. Over the next three years, the protection team will be expected to deliver multiple services: disaster recovery, backup, and archive. 2. The protection team must tie together a disparate set of technology components and owners. Virtually every part of IT plays a role in data protection. The application team is the focus because it is delivering the technology value to the business. IT infrastructure—virtualization, storage, servers, and network—must keep the business applications running.

7. PROTECTION STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DEFINED The protection team must bring together the right people, processes, and architecture to transform the technical and organizational complexity into a successful solution. From a technology standpoint, a Protection Storage Architecture consists of three, loosely coupled modules: • Protection Storage: This is the anchor of the architecture. First, protection storage has a unique design center in the storage world: cost-optimized storage with high data durability that can deliver disaster recovery, backup, and archive. Second, to avoid creating silos of protection storage, the platform must support multiple protocols (e.g., VTL, NAS, OST and deduplication-aware protocols such as EMC® Data Domain® Boost) and integrate with multiple data sources (e.g., applications,

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hypervisors, storage, and backup applications). The right protection storage sets the team down a path of a flexible, reliable, scalable infrastructure for protection. • Data Source Integration: Internal customers want two things from their protection team: performance and visibility. Backup and recovery needs to be fast, and customers want visibility into the protection of their data. The protection storage architecture leverages both the optimized data flows and user interfaces of the data sources: hypervisor, application, and storage. The data sources deliver optimized protection performance because they can track the data as it changes (e.g., VMware Changed Block Tracking, array snapshots) versus trying to figure out what changed after the fact (e.g., traditional backup agent searching through all the data for the changes). The user interface (e.g., VMware, vSphere®, Oracle RMAN, EMC Unisphere™) displays protection status in that team’s preferred, native interface. Data source integration eliminates the two causes of the accidental architecture—performance and visibility. Of course, this integration is available only with a protection storage architecture as the foundation. • Data Management Services: The protection team delivers value with data management services. Thus far, the architecture eliminates the causes of the accidental architecture, but the protection team needs to add value to convince their customers to adopt their services. What services can they offer? Senior management wants to ensure the protection meets SLAs and compliance regulations—as cost effectively as possible. They need analytics and reports for compliance, policy, and infrastructure utilization. Customers want to be able to retrieve any version of any information, easily and quickly. The protection team needs to have a catalog of the company’s information—from local snapshots to backup copies to offsite/ cloud copies to their deep archives. By taking on the responsibilities that everybody in the organization deems necessary, but that nobody wants to do, the protection team gains the credibility to consolidate data protection.

8. FROM BLUEPRINT TO REALITY: BUILDING YOUR OWN GAME PLAN The protection storage architecture is a blueprint to guide the transformation of data protection to a clean, centralized protection service. However, each organization’s blue print will be unique to its business. Understanding the role of the core components of the protection storage architecture will ensure a gamechanging journey.

PROTECTION STORAGE—MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICES Protection storage is the anchor of the architecture, so how does an organization ensure it makes the right choice? A well-designed protection storage platform differs from other types of storage. While some users try to deploy a “good enough” solution with a generic storage platform, it does not meet their evolving needs. Protection has a unique design center: cost-optimized, multi-use, and highly durable storage. 1. Data Durability. Since protection spans disaster recovery, backup, and archival, organizations need storage that ensures the data will be there—potentially decades later. First, you’ll need layers of RAID, disk scrubs, checksums, and a file system built to be resilient to errors. Second, you’ll need storage that has life beyond your current hardware purchase. The compute and storage components of your protection storage architecture will be replaced over the lifespan of the

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data, but you will need to ensure that you preserve the data. The Data Invulnerability Architecture of the EMC Data Domain storage systems does this. 2. Multi-Use. Your organization cannot afford the capital and operational expense of purchasing and maintaining three separate storage solutions for backup, disaster recovery, and archival. Conversely, it cannot afford a “least common denominator” approach that does not meet RPO/RTO/compliance needs (e.g., everything on tape). Converged protection via versioned replication is the best way to scale protection performance with data growth. Therefore, your organization will want to select protection storage that can support versioned replication to unify backup, disaster recovery, and archival. 3. Cost-Optimized. Price matters. The first step toward cost optimization is space optimization—reducing the number of copies (e.g., backup, disaster recovery, and archive), the overhead of storing multiple copies (i.e., deduplication) and the footprint of each copy (i.e., compression). The second step is developing software to leverage lower-cost hardware components. This includes scaling performance with CPU and capacity with low-cost, large-capacity storage—while not compromising data durability and space optimization. As organizations begin to streamline their infrastructures, one of the key goals is to eliminate silos. Data protection teams need to consolidate the protection storage silos into protection storage pools, or data lakes. There are two requirements for this to happen:

For web-enabled viewers: Video: The Backup Window

1. Multiple Data Sources. Protection teams must support data generated by backup application clients, primary applications (e.g., SQL dumps), primary storage (e.g., snapshots, clones, replicas), and hypervisors. The set of protection protocols includes: tape (or VTL), NAS, OST, EMC Data Domain Boost, iSCSI, FCP, and object interfaces. The protection storage needs to support a variety of workloads: traditional file server backup (weekly full, nightly incremental), VMware Changed Block Tracking (incremental forever), the assortment of Oracle mechanisms (e.g. RMAN SBT, incremental merge, multiplexing), etc. 2. Evolution. The set of protection workflows will continue to increase. While many vendors act as if customers will “rip and replace” their old infrastructures, most protection environments look like a geological dig—multiple layers of active, historical solutions. While switching the backup software can be very difficult (the “vendor lock-in” point), at a minimum you should consolidate the protection storage. Therefore, select protection storage that can handle the variety of workloads in your environment today (mainframe, iSeries, VTL, disk-centric backup, etc.) and evolve to meet tomorrow’s workloads. While it is unlikely that any organization will fully consolidate into one protection storage offering (there’s always a one-off somewhere), the protection team can select an anchor platform that becomes the core of virtually every offering—today and in the future.

DATA SOURCE INTEGRATION–WHY DOES IT MATTER? Without performance and visibility, users lose confidence in the protection team. They lose confidence in backup and archive processes; they don’t trust that users will have access to data when and where they need it, and so they slow development, roll their own solutions, and so on. With performance and visibility, the protection can drive business. Faster backups and restores minimize data loss and downtime (and improve “time to”), reduce management complexity, and improve data recovery. With visibility of the data 10

protection environment, application teams and end users gain confidence and trust, focus on business innovation, and drive revenue. The question is, how can your organization improve performance and visibility? The answer lies with data source integration (see Protection Storage Architecture), and no one does it better than EMC. The data source—the hypervisor, application, or storage system—touches every bit of information that its users generate or access, and the management interface provides the control. By sitting in the data path, the data source can optimize protection performance, and by incorporating protection controls into its user interface, the data source gives data owners the visibility they require in their preferred interfaces. The Data Source Effect on Performance With traditional backup, agents search for needles in a haystack. The agents sit idle until backup time, at which time they awake and look for new data to protect. They search every single file in the data set and then run checksum comparisons to identify the new data within each file. This is a very I/O-intensive process with big “time to” consequences. However, when the data sources are integrated, there is no need to look at every file or checksum every file. The data source owns the file and knows exactly what data needs to be protected. It executes the users’ every creation, modification, and deletion, which means it can keep a log, journal, or bitmap of the changes. So, instead of searching for needles in a haystack, the data source hands the backup process a pre-ordered set of needles. And when it comes to restore, it just asks for those needles back. This reduces backup and recovery times from days and hours to minutes or seconds. The Data Source Effect on Visibility Let’s face it, end users and administrators do not want to log on into a backup interface. They want to be able to see and manage protection from their primary tool whether it’s vSphere, Oracle, SAP, Unisphere, NFS/CIFS share, etc., and that’s why data source integration is critical. By connecting to users via their preferred interfaces, end users and administrators get the view into data protection that they need—without having to learn a new interface—and backup administrators get the control they need. This level of visibility across the organizations prevents application teams and end users from going rogue, and it provides backup administrators with a consolidated view of the data protection environment that is essential in today’s organization.

DATA MANAGEMENT SERVICES—NOW THE FUN BEGINS For decades, backup administrators have dreamed about what they could do if they did not have to be reactive. Data management services—rolled out as part of a Protection Storage Architecture—change the game. They allow protection teams to do more, and they present them, as overseers of all of an organization’s data, with a huge opportunity to drive business value in our “Big Data” world. At minimum, successful protection teams need to cover the baseline, and that means being able to handle protection that isn’t just driven by their applications. But the real fun begins when protection teams get to go beyond the baseline and add services like predictive analytics and insight to their arsenal of services offerings.

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Baseline Data Management Services Organizations that have consolidated their protection environments have the necessary foundation to provide baseline services of backup, recovery, and compliance reporting. Users can protect and recover their data when they need it. The protection team must ensure that information is protected and can be recovered, regardless of how the data is protected (traditional backup client or datasource integration), where it is stored (protection storage, tape, or cloud), or where the data resides (data center, remote office, mobile device). Most important, when an end user, application owner, auditor, or lawyer needs data, the protection team must be able to retrieve it. Furthermore, the protection team must drive protection policies, track the data, and manage the protection infrastructure to generate the reports that demonstrate regulatory and corporate compliance, as well as protection SLA conformance. To deliver the baseline services, the protection team needs visibility across the entire environment—from snapshots to replicas to backups to archive to cloud sharing. Advanced Data Management Services Protection teams can leverage analytics to deliver business-critical value. First, organizations crave visibility and control over their infrastructure spending and growth. The protection team can track data growth rates by division, application, location, and data type. Not only does this help them project what they will need (protection storage, bandwidth, compute), but it can also provide insight into the primary storage and application environment. Second, the protection team can derive insight from the data. Most groups either view only their silo of information, so they lack the full visibility across all the data. The protection team has a catalog of every piece of data in the environment. With that pool of data, some groups are already searching for security/compliance leaks, optimizing test and development, and hardening their systems. With the organization’s data at its fingertips, protection teams can deliver value beyond the baseline—and further accelerate the business.

9. REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES OF TRANSFORMATION Transformation is all about creating a scalable service offering that delivers what organizations need when they need it—seamlessly and efficiently. End users simply sign up for what they need, and they get it. It’s not about ripping and replacing existing backup infrastructures. However, the biggest benefit of a “transformed” backup and archive environment is speed—the all-important “time to” deliver business value. As end users spin up new applications, the protection is already in place. There’s no waiting, no worrying, and no need to pick up the phone. End users focus on doing what’s right for the business. Because they know their data is safe, they are free to think about leveraging technology to enhance business. For example: • A financial services company is using transformed backups to accelerate its expansion into worldwide operations because it knows its data, wherever it is, is safe. With EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems as a foundation, this company not only trusts that its local backup will succeed, but also protect against site loss.

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For web-enabled viewers: Video: Alliance Trust PLC on EMC Avamar—VMware

• A technology company is using transformed backups to improve product development cycles. Traditionally, it had constrained the size of its NAS shares to limit its backup/recovery exposure. The company artificially split projects into smaller pieces, which complicated the development process and irritated developers. With EMC Avamar® deduplication software and systems driving an order of magnitude performance transformation, the company can now share all project data on one central share—which drives productivity. • A retail organization is using transformed backups to improve customer profiling and accelerate business. Historically, all database backups had run through the backup team. The DBAs had no visibility into whether their databases were truly recoverable, and they had to depend on the backup team to run all the recoveries— from row to table to database. As a result, the DBAs were extraordinarily averse to change. When the backup team offered Data Domain systems as a service for the DBAs to run their own backups, the entire culture changed. The team was confident in its ability to protect and recover the databases. They became more aggressive at implementing database changes—enabling them to better analyze customer data, which improved business. When organizations truly believe in their backup and archive infrastructures, they truly leverage IT to drive the business—and that’s good.

10. BACKUP AND ARCHIVE—AND THE JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD Backup and archive is the last thing many might think about when considering the journey to the cloud. But, as we have already stressed, backup and archive does matter. Certainly, step one on any journey to the cloud includes virtualization—and that’s a good place to ensure you have the right backup solution.

For web-enabled viewers: Video: Accelerating Backup Transformation, Part III: Empowering the Backup Team

That’s because the wrong solution for backup won’t just slow your virtual build-out plans. It will also affect the pace at which you deploy production applications onto your virtual infrastructure and, ultimately, your ability to optimize IT as a Service capabilities and archive information. Fortunately, there are several ways you can ensure backup is not a bottleneck on your journey to the cloud. EMC offers three proven paths to the cloud, all of which include backup and recovery as a component. On one end of the spectrum is the ability to build your own virtual infrastructure using EMC products and other third-party, best-in-class components. This approach lets you customize a solution to suit your exact needs. But of course this approach is more complicated because it involves designing, integrating, and deploying a bestin-class solution. A second option is to use the EMC VSPEX™ proven infrastructure. VSPEX is a set of complete virtualization solutions, proven by EMC and designed for flexibility. These reference architectures are validated to ensure interoperability and fast deployment. Third, the Vblock® Systems from VCE are a converged infrastructure built on VMware, Cisco, and EMC components. One of the main advantages of a Vblock System is that each system delivers predictable units of performance and scales across a wide range of application requirements.

11. GETTING STARTED WITH BACKUP It is very rare that someone gets to walk in to an IT department with a clean sheet of paper and build the perfect backup solution from scratch. However, there are steps teams can take to transform their existing environments: 13

SMARTER BACKUP TRANSFORMS BUSINESS

For web-enabled viewers: Customer video: Loomis Armored

Step 1: Find and implement the right disk platform for backup and archive. Remember, it’s all about getting the backup team out of the weeds—out of the daily troubleshooting—and thinking more strategically. To do this, the backup team needs to find a disk-based platform to anchor their environments (this is the protection storage layer discussed earlier). This is the single, fastest way to create a worry-free backup and archive environment, and droves of organizations are doing it. The right disk platform eliminates common tape problems (e. g., due to not having enough tape media slots, multiplexing, etc.), removes common bottleneck issues, and makes it possible to perform quick recoveries while backups are running. This may seem like a simplistic, obvious step—one that organizations have been taking for a decade. But if you haven’t done it yet, it’s the easiest way to make any backup and archive environment healthier—without making any changes to backup software or backup policies or needing to hire new staff. Step 2: Start working with the biggest pain point users and find solutions to their biggest problems. Look for the group that is the most dissatisfied with backup and win them over. It’s that simple. In doing so, they become the biggest advocates for the backup team internally, and with this support, the backup team can replicate the success across other lines of business.

For web-enabled viewers: Customer video: Discovery Holdings

Generally, the biggest pain point users are either the high-end application user (read: your most challenging DBA), the high-end virtualization administrator, or, in some cases, the NAS administrator. In any of these cases, understand their challenges and find a backup mechanism that enables them to protect their environments more efficiently. Discuss backup pains, processes, and goals and talk about specific technologies or solutions to these problems. Step 3: Add value-added services and share them across your environment. This is really the fun part of the job. At this point, the backup team has proven itself to its customers. Now, you can start to add extra value. The value-add can range from:

EMC Backup Leadership Microsite

• Charge-back: Ensuring that each team is paying for what they protect, bringing transparency to the business. • Security: Encryption and replication services to ensure that data never ends up in the wrong hands. • Compliance: Centralized reporting to prove SLAs are being met and in compliance with with the ever-increasing array of regulations. • Disaster recovery: Moving data offsite; in some cases, supporting rapid VMware and application recovery. • Long-term retention: Ensuring that backup and archival data remain accessible for regulatory or eDiscovery purposes. • Breadth of coverage: Remote offices? Desktops/laptops? Perhaps these were always on to-do lists. Now you can roll out the solutions quickly and efficiently. • Data protection management: Allowing realtime reporting and analysis to proactively intercept problems before they occur and manage overall costs. EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Avamar, Data Domain, Unisphere, VSPEX, and Vblock are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware Inc. in the United States or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2012, 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 6/13 eBook 123828

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EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.