Growing Data; Use Unified Data Protection

Authored By Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Sales Director India & SAARC, Arcserve

In today’s era, businesses are becoming more and more dependent on IT, and they cannot afford to have downtime for the critical applications as it is associated with both tangible and intangible losses. There are stringent SLA’s the IT department has to agree to in terms of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objectives ranging from hours to seconds in minutes.

As part of the service delivery model, the SLA’s must be further improvised as part of the continuous improvement cycle. The data recovery approach selected needs to be carefully whetted to ensure that it is reliable and will provide foolproof data integrity.

Continuous availability is the need of the hour. Depending upon the criticality of the workload which is in turn dependent on the urgency and the impact to the organization, the protection mechanism for data recovery has to be evaluated and defined. Technology has enabled customers to think beyond, with the software-defined centres, virtualization and grid computing.

The elasticity remains the key benefit which enables businesses to scale up/down depending upon the market need. With such technological innovations and simultaneous exponential growth in data, a reliable, scalable, interoperable and efficient management solution should be selected. As per the 3-2-1 rule, data should be protected using two different medias and one copy has to be offsite either on the cloud or Disaster Recovery site considering site-level failures.

Disk-based backup solutions which are fast becoming more prominent offer faster reliable recovery mechanisms. A unified data protection service offers 360 degrees of its management capabilities and is the need of the hour. It should and can offer Backup/Recovery and Disaster Recovery solution. The topline UDP solutions available today can integrate with the key pillars of the modern-day centre comprising of physical, virtual & cloud, and provides all in a plug and play an appliance.

The strength of the unified approach solution lies in completeness and reduced complexity that is ease of use, deployment and management. The backup storage should be completely scalable and should provide various capacities to choose from depending upon the data need. The appliance offers inbuilt compression and data deduplication which may offer a 3:1 ratio for the unstructured data. The Arcserve UDP appliance is Ideal for customers that require a “set it and forget it” backup and recovery solution. The appliance comes pre-configured with the storage, computer, management software, UDP licenses and network cards.

This results in operational efficiencies and helps reduce complexity further. UDP Appliance is perfect backup and recovery solution for organizations with remote offices and decentralized IT departments. Today data centre is heterogeneous in nature comprising of workloads running on different platforms, Arcserve UDP provides the single console for all the backup/recovery/ DR related needs. The solution has an inbuilt encryption mechanism to safeguard data from unauthorized access and theft.

The UDP appliance is Interoperable with existing UDP software deployments. Forever growing source data the appliance is future-proofed with field expansion service. The cloud adoption provides agility, less reliance on subject matter expertise and reduces total cost of ownership, therefore, the cloud will remain an obvious choice for the customers to retain one offsite data copy.

The Unified approach offers integration and provides Instant VM Recovery/ Virtual Standby capabilities on public clouds such as AWS and Azure. Capabilities such as Full System High Availability enables continuous replication, host monitoring & failover to an offline replica server instance in the Amazon EC2 cloud An All In One solution is one that suits all range of business and data needs.

The ease of use and management gave that it is pre-fabricated allows for lower turnaround time. Solutions are also completely vendor agnostic and therefore can integrate with the diverse range of server and storage platforms for data management needs. It allows to mitigate risk and manage stringent SLA’s by selecting relevant backup/DR methodologies depending upon the criticality.

Technologies like instant failover/bare metal restore (BMR) and on-appliance Virtual Standby allows recovery in minutes of time irrespective of the size of data and nature of the application. The backup data footprint can be decreased to great extent using global deduplication, reducing disk requirement at the destination.