Flash is Great, But Is Your Business Transformation at Risk?

Two weeks ago, we declared 2016 “The Year of All Flash in Primary Storage” and made some big bets with our product portfolio. Flash is revolutionizing the data center and empowering businesses to do more, faster and with large volumes of data.  But, as businesses leverage the power of flash to deliver massive scale, performance and reliability, traditional data protection can’t keep up with the amount of data they need to protect while, at the same time, their tolerance for downtime and data loss shrinks.

This can leave businesses with an uncomfortable choice: scale back their plans for flash deployment or leave workloads vulnerable to loss or corruption by rolling the dice on traditional backup solutions and hoping all their data is protected. One way to avoid this and ensure data is protected quickly, reliably and efficiently is to leverage a flash-optimized data protection solution. 

Three steps to safety

EMC is advising businesses to make data protection a key criteria when evaluating flash storage architectures to ensure that they do not leave mission-critical data vulnerable.  This can be accomplished by following these simple steps:

Step 1: Choose a flash array that includes rich data services and storage-integrated data protection to maximize investment.

Step 2: Match your flash array with protection storage that is open to consolidate all your protection needs, has dedupe technology to minimize storage requirements, and is designed as a “storage of last resort” to help ensure recovery, no matter what.

Step 3: Leverage intelligent protection software to help ensure protected copies are application consistent for fast, simple granular recovery.

Unleashing the potential of flash

EMC has developed industry-leading solutions so our customers can use flash to its full potential AND enjoy the peace of mind that comes with flash-optimized data protection.  That’s why EMC has offered EMC ProtectPoint since 2014. ProtectPoint combines industry-leading primary storage technology and best-in-class protection storage with software, to enable customers to back up directly from their all-flash array to Data Domain.

ProtectPoint offers 20 times faster, more efficient backup for mission-critical applications while completely eliminating backup impact on application servers. In addition, ProtectPoint empowers application owners by giving them direct control of backup and recovery. By eliminating traditional backup applications, ProtectPoint dramatically reduces cost and complexity. Finally, all ProtectPoint backups can be instantly accessed, providing fast granular recovery directly from Data Domain.  Overall, ProtectPoint is designed to protect data at the speed of flash.

ProtectPoint is fully integrated with EMC’s flash offerings and comes as optional protection software with the recently launched EMC VMAX All Flash as well as for EMC XtremIO.  ProtectPoint is additionally available for EMC VMAX3.

Ensure you’re not at risk by investing in a data protection solution that protects at the speed of flash.

About the Author: Peter Smails