As the holiday season rolls around, there are plenty of things people are wishing for like new gadgets, updated wardrobe, or even a cozy pet bed for your best friend. And while those things are all well and good, not everyone is hoping for just stocking stuffers this year. The IT industry is now having to deal with an explosion of new data that needs to be protected, and a lack of visibility and control of that data. Faster backup and better protection options are becoming a must. So when a backup admin is asked to make their own holiday wish list, you can bet a new fridge for the office wasn’t at the top. So what is on the backup admin wishlist?|
“I want to always meet my backup windows”:
When you ask an application or backup owner if they need faster backup and recovery to meet their stringent SLAs – they’re going to tell you yes. Meeting backup windows is becoming harder than ever, and the amount of data that needs to be moved from one place to another is increasing, so speeding that process up is key. When you start talking about mission critical applications, backup and app admins are putting a nice big star next to the first item on their wish list.
Though Santa might not be able to pop down the chimney with this, fortunately for application owners and backup admins, Dell EMC can. Faster backup can sometimes seem out of reach, but by removing the application and backup server from the process, admins can get up to 20x faster backup to better meet their backup windows. Need faster recovery too? Not a problem. With differential restore, which means only recovering the difference between the production and protection lun, app admins can see up to 10x faster recovery . If your application being paused for the length of the backup is also a problem, the removal of the application server from the backup process can reduce or completely eliminate any impact.
“I need my storage to be more reliable”:
When backup admins or application owners move data to their protections storage, they expect it to be protected. Not only that, they expect to be able to recover that data if anything goes wrong – like a meteor hitting your primary storage, for example. Backups and archives are a solution of last resort, but unfortunately, not many people have as much confidence in it as you’d expect.
According to the Global Data Protection index, 71% of businesses are not fully confident that they can recover their data. That’s a lot of businesses! What admins need to protect against integrity issues, and build confidence in their ability to recover, is inline data verification. This type of verification will detect issues as they are going into your storage, and correct them during the process. Just as important as making sure the data going to your storage is correct, is making sure the data on your storage stays correct. Ideally, the data stored on your protection storage should undergo continuous fault detection and self-healing. With all this, admins are provided with the industry’s best defense against data integrity issues, period.
”Better utilization of my storage is a must”:
Once the admin is ensured that their extremely important data is protected, free of errors and able to be recovered if needed, they’re going to want to make sure that they’re utilizing their valuable protection storage effectively. Deduplication, which is the process of eliminating redundant data, is everyone’s first step when trying to reduce your storage and network requirements. However, not all deduplication is created equal. With variable-length segmentation, which provides the highest deduplication rates possible, app admins can see better reductions in their storage and network requirements as opposed to traditional deduplication. This type of deduplication ensures that your capacity is not spent protecting redundant data, which then results in a smaller footprint for data protection. Advanced deduplication also means higher effective scalability and less infrastructure to manage. In other words, deduplication can minimize cost and complexity in your environment, allowing you to spend that money on other important things – maybe like that fridge for the office.
”I want more control and visibility over backups, and app admins!”:
As the backup admins know, there’s a lot of change occurring in the data protection landscape today. For both backup and application owners, as we mentioned before, difficulty meeting backup windows is becoming a problem. Due to an explosion of data that needs to be protected, and a lack of control and visibility into backups, many application admins are becoming dissatisfied with their current solutions. Who can blame them? This, though, can prompt app admins to start backing up to whatever storage is available, which can lead to backups being placed on the wrong system. What backup admins and app admins need is a more self-service data protection solution that empowers application owners to do their own backups and recoveries.
Backup admins want to be able to provide app admins with the control and visibility they need, so they don’t end up with unnecessary silos of storage. That being said, after empowering application owners to go off on their own, it’s even more important to provide visibility to the backup team. The backup admin needs a solution that provides a unified, comprehensive view into backups by monitoring the data on each storage system, as well as the flow of data between them. They also need to be able to monitor and report the progress of the data movement from primary storage to protection storage, while also providing insight into health, performance and other key metrics. Just as important as visibility is the ability for backup admins to have a tool that will identify any issues in the environment. If an issue in the environment arises, they need to be able to identify and troubleshoot any backup failures.
If you’re a backup admin, and your list looks a lot like the one above, consider sending Dell EMC your holiday wish list this year. We’ll provide everything you need, while also letting you keep those Christmas cookies Santa would have wanted. Happy holidays from your friends at Dell EMC!