Take a Fresh Look at Backup, Recovery and Archiving - Amazon AWS

Take a Fresh Look at Backup, Recovery and Archiving BRINGING YOUR BACKUP, RECOVERY AND ARCHIVING PROCESSES UP TO THE NEEDS OF A VIRTUAL AND CLOUD-ENABLED ENVIRONMENT With data amounts and profiles changing and growing businesses need to be smarter about how they approach protection. They need to look beyond the data that is active in their environments and determine what can be tiered off to make room for the most important workloads. At the same time, as the walls of the data center continue to be broken down by the rise of cloud computing, they need assurance that they can recover data anywhere, anytime. That requires a fresh look at backup, recovery and archiving.

Information is being created with greater volume and variety than ever before. IDC predicts 44 ZBs of data will exist by the end of the decade.1 Further, the value associated with this data is at an all-time high – organizations that harness it properly gain the ability to derive real-time insight into ongoing operations. This gives them a competitive edge – but only if they can efficiently store, backup and rapidly recover their data. To meet such needs, infrastructure is evolving at an unprecedented pace: Mobility, virtualization, Big Data, the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and DevOps have changed the face of the modern enterprise. Yet the same old problems remain – backup, recovery and archiving continue to plague IT departments. In fact, these issues are far more severe today than ever.

WHY TRADITIONAL BACKUP APPROACHES STRUGGLE The IT landscape has become so sophisticated that traditional approaches to backup and recovery struggle badly and rarely provide comprehensive data protection – they safeguard portions of the overall data set but leave large areas unprotected. And they are rarely able to recover fast enough or with enough granularity to satisfy ongoing demands. In addition, it has become impossible to retain all data in production systems. Increasingly, organizations are required to retain information for specific time periods in archives where it is retained in a secure and unaltered form. Even in those rare instances when a backup, recovery or archiving application does an acceptable job, they tend to exist as islands unto themselves. Although they manage to backup most enterprise data, they don’t integrate well with other storage or data protection systems. Bottom line: These apps just weren’t built to work together. Integration between backup, recovery, archiving, storage and other enterprise systems means negotiating a labyrinth of communication, consistency and collaboration hurdles. Yet these data protection elements must be successfully integrated and consolidated in order to escape the trap of erecting yet another set of independent siloes within the infrastructure. More importantly, integration is essential if an organization is to effectively protect its information assets – that takes backup, recovery and archiving working in tight coordination. And it must be achieved in such a way that IT processes are streamlined, manual labor is reduced and in alignment with budgetary necessities.

GET SMART ABOUT DATA PROTECTION With data amounts and profiles changing and growing, therefore, businesses need to be smarter about how they approach protection.

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1 IDC, Digital Universe Study, April 2014

The value associated with data is at an all-time high organizations that harness it properly gain the ability to derive real-time insight into ongoing operations.

They need to look beyond the data that is active in their environments and determine what can be tiered off to make room for the most important workloads. At the same time, as the walls of the data center continue to be broken down by the rise of cloud computing, they need assurance that they can recover data anywhere, anytime. That requires a fresh look at backup, recovery and archiving.

BACKUP Backup has changed so much over the past decade. It can be physical or virtual, on-premises or in the cloud, and it can be initiated at many points throughout the enterprise, not only by the backup administrator. Yet, the fundamentals remain: It must be possible to back up the enterprise rapidly without inhibiting the production environment. Further, there must be some form of assurance that all data has been backed up. Obviously, the protection of workloads across data centers, geographies, and in the cloud must be achievable without tying up inordinate amounts of administrative time. Therefore, it must be possible to back up data and applications regardless of the platform, location or hypervisor, while permitting automatic discovery and protection for dynamic virtual environments. It should not matter where data lives — it can and should be protected. The attainment of that goal requires a high degree of integration in order to understand and manage the data. Backup, then, should be able to tie into all major platforms, applications and databases. Whatever Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or tools are available from platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, SAP, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Informix or Microsoft Exchange Server, modern backup software should be able to easily harness them to drive tight ties into the application for granular protection and recovery.

SMARTER BACKUP As well as being able to interface and comprehensively protect data from any application, database or environment, backup requires more intelligence in order to conserve bandwidth and avoid waste of storage capacity. The old approach of robotically backing up everything again and again has no place in the age of Big Data. Coping with the explosion in data growth requires only moving what you need to move, storing what you need to store, and backing up only those files and versions that have not been backed up previously.

Backup of data and applications must be possible, regardless of the platform, location or hypervisor. It should not matter where data lives - it can and should be protected.

That intelligence must be capable of tracking and moving solely the changed blocks while eliminating long scan times and thereby speeding up application/file/hypervisor backups by moving far less data. This objective should also be supported by built in deduplication at the source and at rest to consume far less storage. But features

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such as this should not demand the addition and integration of special hardware. They should simply be layered upon any disk or cloud target. Another factor that can greatly improve backup economics is to utilize software that can operate on existing hardware. After all, much organizational expense has gone into the establishment of the existing storage footprint. Revamping and modernizing backup should be attainable while utilizing other investments to their fullest. Whether the equipment was supplied by vendors such as DataCore, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, IBM, INFINIDAT, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Oracle ZFS or Pure Storage, an intelligent backup application should run without the need for complex middleware, lengthy integration projects or added appliances. What else should be part of the modern backup equation? Look for features like automated, script-free snapshot management, support for a broad set of cloud platforms, cloud orchestration, provisioning and management.

RECOVERY

Backup is Changing, Are You Preapred? Read about the 5 backup necessities for the modern enterprise and how they can help you manage today’s growing volumes of data.

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Efficient backup is certainly important, but only if it facilitates fast recovery. After all, the point is not just to have a copy of data sitting somewhere. Its real purpose is to provide a copy that is accessible rapidly in the event of a data loss incident or disaster. Additionally, the sophistication of 21st century environments demands the ability to recover workloads, regardless of where they are being protected, and restore them in the cloud. This freedom in terms of recovery location decouples organizations from having to maintain cold/warm duplicate infrastructure that is expensive yet rarely used. The ability to achieve this decoupling takes recovery to a whole new realm – recovering what you need, where you need it, and without being limited to your own four walls. In the modern era, there are so many possibilities of how enterprises may wish to recover their data. For example, they may wish to take virtual workloads protected under one hypervisor and recover them into another. Alternatively, the organization may wish to have its data recovered to a cloud provider so as to avoid the need to operate a secondary data center. And there is even the option of providing operational recovery of primary site applications to a secondary site from an external cloud provider.

SMARTER RECOVERY Recovery, then, should go well beyond the simple retrievable of a backup tape or file and enable the automation of DR business processes. This must encompass application recovery & testing, policy based VM provisioning, and cross-platform operation. The recovery process should be able to deal with Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS),

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VMware or Hyper-V, comfortably transition data from a private cloud to the public cloud, and from a physical to a virtual environment. On-demand live access is another key facet of fast-paced recovery. That takes the indexing of operations on the fly at the point of recovery, as well as the ability to mount volume/ DataStore/RDM to access data in native format. When IT wishes to recover some data, this should not cause disruption. Accordingly, it should be possible to execute recovery operations in the background, create thin copies of databases for secondary use and mirror block changes for automated failover to an alternate site. The concept of recovery, then, has been expanded well beyond the traditional approach of retrieving an old backup tape, and then seeing what it contains. To this, has been added the capacity to instantly access data. Further, protected copies of data should be accessible natively and directly, before even having to restore it. This ability to immediately access data sets makes it feasible to quickly validate that the right data has been found and then allow IT to rapidly direct its restoration from there. The possibilities this type of functionality opens up are almost endless, For example, the storage administrator can take protected copies of a database and activate them in order to use those copies for test/dev/ QA purposes. Alternatively, those protected copies can be harnessed to manage the lifecycle so that once the data is no longer needed, it can be cleaned up. Additionally, the whole subject of database cloning takes on new life. It should be a simple matter to expedite clone operations without having to go back to production to generate the data. Similarly, IT should have the ability to clone any database or snapshot to a separate instance via a one-step cloning process that can spawn multiple copies from the same snapshot. Automatic creation, cleanup and expiration of clones should also be part of the equation. Most importantly, these capabilities should not remain the province of only a few highly trained storage administrators. In order to match the speed of digital business, they should be available on a self-service for DBAs and end-users. And then there is the matter of data portability. Data should never be locked into one set of hardware or one platform. These days, it is essential to be able to take your data anywhere as an essential facet of continuous protection and replication for the migration of private cloud VMs or databases, public cloud databases and VM environments. Any recovery platform should give IT the freedom to migrate workloads across what used to be impassable boundaries – between sites, geographies, and even hypervisors. In summary then, recovery requires simplification down to the push button level. By adding automation to DR processes and cutting down on the touchpoints needed to test or failover virtual infrastructure, a tremendous quantity of manual overhead can be eliminated.

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ARCHIVE For the last several years, the subject of archiving of digital files has grown in importance. The challenge has been that with 69% of stored data no longer valuable to the enterprise, how do you remove data yet still provide access? That demands archive policies for File and NAS systems that can automatically offload inactive data sets. This should also be achievable without adding an enormous cost burden to the enterprise. Therefore, it becomes necessary to combine backup and archive tasks into a single operation in order to control costs and reduce overhead. This should also be supplemented by effective deduplication to further reduce footprint, and all of this should be offered with transparent end-user access to the data if needed – again, an essential aspect of minimizing traffic to already overburdened storage personnel. By making these operations transparent to the end user, they can still see and access those data sets if needed, but now you no longer have them occupying space on your more costly hardware tiers. By doing so, storage assets can achieve an extended lifespan.

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SMARTER ARCHIVING commvau.lt/2efDy6v But arriving at this goal is no walk in the park. It requires the integration of advanced analytics to easily identify data sets that are idle and automate their migration out of the primary tiers and into archive repository. Archiving, of course, poses additional challenges. Take the case of the rapid growth in the number of SharePoint sites and documents, inactive datasets residing inside structured systems such as Oracle and SAP databases, or steadily growing email content on-premises and in the cloud. The sheer volume of information eaten up by these systems demands an archiving architecture that can manage the explosion of virtual environments, tier off older data sets from your applications to reduce bloat and ensure they are performing optimally, move SharePoint documents or whole sites, manage mailbox sizes while preserving access and archive referentially intact database tables. That calls for policy driven space management and software that can operate across any on-premises or cloud-based storage platform. One final point on smarter archiving – virtualization. Storage administrators are often left to cope with the fact that as much as 40% of the VMs created end up being unused. Many of these small VMs eat up insignificant amounts of capacity, yet about 10% of wasted VMs have a major impact on cost. They tie up large amounts of capacity and act as a drain on system performance. That’s why it is imperative to target inactive VMs to reclaim valuable resources, relocate dormant VMs to less expensive storage, archive or retire VMs automatically while retaining easy access to archived VMs.

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THE COMMVAULT DIFFERENCE Far from being a wish list for future consideration by developers when they come to design the backup, recovery and archiving applications of the future, the capabilities outlined above already exist. They are part of the Commvault Data Platform, a platform that was designed to transform data into a strategic asset. It all starts with data protection. By gathering data and putting it all into one repository, the possibility of data loss is minimized by applying reliable, successful data protection techniques. Data loss, though, is inevitable, whether through human error, hardware failure or environmental damage. So when trouble does happen, businesses need to return to service as quickly as possible, and Commvault provides the tools to make that happen. Through a central repository and single index the Commvault Data Platform increases data visibility. Automation, orchestration and policybased management increase IT productivity by simplifying operations and making them more reliable. This saves on operational costs. And finally, though a whole host of different technologies, organizations can maximize the value of their IT assets: this includes storage, networks, servers and cloud resources. By shrinking data footprints, reducing network traffic, archiving stale data and other techniques, more value can be driven out of IT assets, prolonging their life span and improving performance. This adds up to reduced capital expenditures and greater overall value.

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