INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Tech Talk
INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Tech Talk
Virtualisation, hyper-
convergence and the
data explosion
Organisations are overwhelmed with data. As the
steep increase in the sheer amount of data aligns with
the decrease of traditional backup recovery software,
Networks Unlimited’s Managing Director, Anton Jacobz
discusses why he believes a rethink is needed.
D
ata management and ROI
value have long been serious
IT challenges. Whether you run
a small home office or are part of an
expansive enterprise, the issues remain
the same; we are drowning in data.
Not only drowning, but also required
to store and safeguard this data for
many reasons ranging from security
requirements, across legal compliances,
disaster recovery in the case of system
failure or compromise, right down
to pure access to our data for both
business use and ever more critical
analysis to leverage the information it
contains to benefit our businesses.
The many problems IT managers
face regarding their data
responsibilities include:
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Larger volumes of data combined
with 24/7 online business
availability shrinking the backup
window period;
Business continuity not being able
to afford downtime, especially
resulting from IT infrastructure or
data availability failure;
Recovery time objectives (RTO)
in these cases becoming critical;
Recovery point objectives (RPO) to
roll back to and the determination
of what losses can be afforded
between recovery points before
failure occurred;
Slow data access; and
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This market space has
several drivers enterprises and upward struggle with
all of them to a degree more or less:
Test and development needs and
data analytics are two areas of value
being widely explored. However, both
are costly to deploy successfully and
performance issues remain pain areas
in old-school solutions, complexity
of multi-vendor product integration
equally so. Many of these product sets
require specialised skills to setup and
manage to drive the TCO up, where
the opposite is the desired result. So,
the thinking needs to broadly address
these issues as well. •
In a research paper on the state of
data management, 451 Research
says: “More than 35% of business
IT users plan to address their backup
and disaster recovery infrastructure
to alleviate pain points. This is a
large segment that knows that they
have been addressing a modern data
centre with 20-year-old technology
and that a fundamental change in
solution thinking is required. Many of
them have, or are introducing primary
storage points into their solutions
basket, and we are seeing a steady
trend towards array-based snapshots
as a fundamental mind shift in data
protection strategies.”
How to prepare now for more
applications that will eventually be
delivered in the cloud
And not only this, but searching for
solutions to these issues via multiple
vendors’ offerings to be configured
together sees costs skyrocket.
A rethink is well overdue
This has led to a rethink on a grand
scale of the old school approach to
data, with the search on for solutions
that keep data at our command
always, essentially a goal of achieving
a zero-backup strategy while retaining
data integrity and fast access to even
long-term archived data. This new
thinking encompasses array-based
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snapshots coupled with replication
and elements of traditional backup/
recovery software related technologies
such as copy data virtualisation, copy
data management and converged
data management.
Nightly incremental backups and
weekly full backups are fading fast
as a single tiered strategy of data
management. They have remained
cumbersome, time consuming,
costly, complex and under performing;
the integrated systems themselves
subject to multiple points of failure.
Primary storage, via its snapshot
technology, now formulates part
of the new thinking in data-
protection strategies.
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Many more of them are seeing the
expanding role of backup data from
a mere insurance policy to a critical
factor in their evaluation of next steps
regarding data management.
Meanwhile, the use of traditional
backup recovery software alone is
steadily decreasing as more than
50% of midsize and large enterprises
are using array-based snapshots in
conjunction with replication and, in
many cases, elements of traditional
backup recovery software. This market
segment is being driven by end-users’
demands for deriving more business
value from backup data.
Data, however, continues to rank
high in the pain stakes. Each point is
a familiar tune being sung. Medium
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Exceeding backup/recovery
window;
Data growth;
Managing backup hardware/
software;
Tape management; and
Defining a retention policy
22% of participants in a recent survey
say backup redesign is a storage project
priority, another 13% say redesigning
their disaster-recovery procedures is
a priority. We therefore see that 35%
of the organisations plan to redesign
their data protection procedures and
infrastructure and in most instances to
alleviate pain and cost with little visible
ROI and continued high TCO.
The modern paradigm: virtualisation
and cloud
Virtualisation and the inevitable use
of cloud infrastructure is a reality
for enterprises, this is even true for
organisations well below that scale of
size. The development of virtualisation
has in many ways been because
of growing needs for both data
expansion and performance scalability
and as such has exacerbated the
data management and protection
problems. We have seen the
appearance of backup/recovery tools
that specialise in protecting only
virtualised environments, adding more
applications, more complexity and
more specialised skills requirements to
manage the complexity. Suffice to say
the problems with existing backup and
recovery methods are essentially the
same in the virtualised data centre as
in the non-virtualised data centre.
Technologies such as incremental
backups, data deduplication and
compression address some of the
problems, but not the important issue
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