According to IDC, the amount of data in the digital universe today amounts to more than 5 zettabytes (ZB). Let's break t
Transforming Data Center Challenges into a Competitive Advantage HARNESSING NEW TECHNOLOGY IN THE FACE OF CHANGE While trends such as mobility, social media and Big Data are driving massive change in the enterprise, they are also creating new challenges for the data center. So how is it possible to harness new technology for competitive advantage while managing, protecting and analyzing data effectively?
Rapid change has become the norm. What Gartner calls a “Nexus of Forces” is assailing the business world. While mobility, the cloud, social media and Big Data continue to drive strategic change, they are also creating major challenges in the datacenter. It’s not just the fact that IT departments have to cope with a mix of legacy and new applications. In addition, they have to accommodate evershortening development cycles, the steady incursion of new technologies, and demands for the underlying datacenter infrastructure to adjust to sudden strategic shifts in alignment with business objectives. While new mindsets and new approaches have emerged, the fundamentals of sound datacenter management still apply. In particular, the value of managing, protecting and utilizing data remains a core function for any CIO or IT executive.
SURVIVING THE DATA EXPLOSION According to IDC, the amount of data in the digital universe today amounts to more than 5 zettabytes (ZB). Let’s break that down to achieve some perspective: A terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes. To get an idea of just how much data that is, the 20 million books in the U.S. Library of Congress equate to about 20 terabytes of data. Now multiply a TB by a thousand and you have a petabyte, another thousand is an exabyte and another 1000 gives you a ZB. By 2020, IDC predicts the digital universe will have expanded to 44 ZB, with a growth rate of around 40% per annum. That’s an awful lot of data to manage, protect and analyze. Traditional backup and data protection strategies are not designed to address such a mammoth volume. Any enterprise laboring under the misconception that they can continue to add disk arrays or tape libraries to cope with data growth is set for a rude awakening. Even if they could cope, the backup and protection function would just to eat up more and more of IT’s time to the point where they would be doing nothing else. Instead of being able to utilize IT for competitive advantage, enterprises would see their IT resources consumed by day-to-day drudgery and an endless toil of trying to stay on top of the data explosion. For many businesses, therefore, success or failure is now defined by the ability to deal with the data explosion in the face of increasing deployment of cloud-based applications as well as mounting infrastructure costs. Lurking somewhere within those vast and disparate data lakes is information that can be transformed into actionable insight – but only if the data is well managed, fully protected and always available. The bottom line, then, is that protecting your data assets is not only more important than ever, it has become more difficult than ever. Information is scattered on-premises and off-premises, in legacy applications and cloud services, with this provider and that provider. Traditional data protection and management paradigms can no longer cope.
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57% of IT professionals struggle to see a complete picture of where their organization’s sensitive data resides. Perspecsys, Survey and Insights from RSA
DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES How can you utilize data when your data protection solution is not application-aware? How can you protect it when you are not sure when the data was last backed up … or if it was backed up at all? How can you leverage production data sets in the cloud for on-site analytics and compliance? For example, few know where all their data resides. According to a survey conducted at a 2015 RSA Security Conference, 57% of IT professionals struggle to see a complete picture of where their organization’s sensitive data resides.1 Similarly, increasingly virtual datacenter environments have added significant stress to the data protection picture due to the addition of complexity to data protection and recovery. Case in point: most organizations use separate backup software for their physical and virtual hosts. Further, the growing popularity of converged infrastructure (servers, switches, and storage) and hyperconverged infrastructures (unified compute, storage, and networking) has burdened IT personnel with additional workloads. They are required to harness multiple software processes and manual scripting to protect data on a converged or hyperconverged infrastructure – otherwise applications and hypervisors do not integrate with back-end storage. This introduces delays, complexity, and risk. Finally, the ubiquitous nature of the cloud has many organizations wrestling with unforeseen implications -- decentralized management, inefficient WAN utilization, data movement headaches, siloed data sets and disaster recovery platforms being unable to span public and private clouds.
CHOOSING THE BEST PATH
Today’s Top 5 Data Protection Challenges
Due to these and many other challenges, organizations are demanding more from their data protection and management technologies. Today’s business demands technologies that treat data as a strategic asset. Traditional approaches simply can’t get the job done and managing multiple products adds cost and complexity. A better solution is needed. To treat data as a strategic asset, new data management approaches must deliver:
Read about the best practices for staying in control of your protected data.
• Agility – high speed data protection that quickly adapts to change • Integration – tight understanding of infrastructure capabilities and limits • Flexibility – application aware, hypervisor aware, operating system aware, cloud aware
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1 Perspecsys, Survey and Insights from RSA – What We Learned, May 11, 2015. http://perspecsys.com/blog-survey-insight-rsa 3
• Reliability – trustworthy data protection that provides quick, granular restoration • Scalability – the solution must grow as data sets grow • Insight – reporting and tracking to facilitate better-decision making • Simplicity – streamlined usability that minimizes scripting or manual intervention. These requirements are now achievable. Commvault® delivers robust, industry-leading data protection and information management solutions tightly integrated and optimized for Cisco infrastructure. The Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) with Commvault enterprise backup software provides a solution that lets you manage the protection of your data assets, regardless of where the data is located or where workloads are being run. It can protect data on-prem in your datacenter, including on Cisco UCS infrastructure and Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure, off-prem in public clouds, or in a mix of the two.
To learn more about using Commvault® and Cisco together for industry-leading data protection and information management, visit: commvault.com/cisco.
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