Challenges of Backup Data Search

Does this sound familiar? It’s Friday, you are busy with lots of projects and you get a call from the CIO that some budget files were deleted and he needs them restored FAST! Now you need to find a copy of the files in order to enjoy your weekend. You have to get this file back TODAY.

After talking to your IT and data management team, you start to scratch your head. Neither of them knows on which server the file resides, nor do they know when the file was created. Not being able to narrow down your search criteria, the backup application will take hours to yield hundreds of files that are irrelevant.

You wish you had the ability to search all the servers, narrow the search criteria, and yield the exact file you are looking for in seconds. You wish searching your backup data were simple and easy.

JZ Backup 1Well, we’ve got good news for you. At EMC World 2015, EMC announced Data Protection Search (DP Search), a data search solution included in EMC Data Protection Suite that helps users like you perform cross-server search of file backups using metadata. It leverages Elasticsearch for scalable, fault-tolerant indexing so search is very easy. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful, search engine.

Search with Ease
DP Search allows users to use wildcards and filtering to narrow down the search results, meaning you can search by date, data range, text, keyword, etc. And because it allows cross-server search, users are not required to have previous knowledge of which backup server a particular client is using.

Search with Speed
Speed is of the essence when it comes to search results. After typing in the search criteria, DP Search yields the results in milliseconds. High speed search eliminates the pain of waiting for a sluggish response.

Extract Insights from the Data
Similar to search criteria, DP Search allows users to visualize search result distribution by date, size, file type, or backup server/client so users can make business use of the data. Customers can drive analytics and make business correlations that couldn’t be performed before.

No additional cost for Data Protection Suite customers
 DP Search is offered as a value-added solution with Data Protection Suite at no additional cost for new and existing Data Protection Suite customers.

Having installed DP Search in the past couple of months, a Data Protection Suite customer who is a large networking company based in Florida shared that DP Search allowed them to go from not being able to find a file to finding every copy of the file they want. With Data Protection Search, you will never have to worry about not being able to find a file quickly for your client.

For more information on Data Protection Suite and Data Protection Search, please visit Data Protection Suite Product Page and watch the DP Search demo.

About the Author: Jennifer Zhou