Transformational Data Protection for Virtualized Mission Critical Applications

There is a wave of change sweeping across IT infrastructure. With the shift to cloud and SDDC, data protection must transform.

The journey to transformation begins with modernizing the current environment, which focuses on delivering IT with fewer people, less time, and less money.  The key is simplification.

Things really begin to change when backup stops being a separate product, managed by a separate team, run in its own silo. Instead, data protection becomes a feature- an integrated part of the environment. In this new world, applications are deployed already protected. Backups and recoveries should be faster, streamlined, with minimal hardware footprint and a lower impact on the production environment.

What does a transformed environment look like?  Data Protection becomes automatic.

The goal here is to speed up backups and recoveries, reduce duplication of costly backup tasks and empower application and database owners who are directly responsible for the data with self-service for data protection with guardrails. And, accomplish this within IT control with central visibility and oversight of backups by IT Administrators, while also solving the difficult data protection problem of large, virtualized, high-rate change mission critical apps.

Express Data Path to Protect Virtualized Mission-Critical Applications

With the increasing prevalence of very large (15 TB+) fast-changing, virtualized mission-critical databases, traditional data protection approaches struggle to keep up.  Application and data owners require speed and control to meet stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for mission critical applications. By decoupling backup software from the data path, administrators can backup directly to protection storage, gaining up to 5x faster backup compared to traditional backup solutions.

With the updated Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications, application owners are empowered to use native application interfaces to perform backups from the VMware hypervisor directly to Dell EMC Data Domain.  Additionally, admins gain discovery, automation and provisioning for the entire data center from storage, applications and VMs.  Impact on application servers during backup windows is significantly reduced, as little or no data flows through the application server.

Empower Administrators With Self-Service and Automation With IT Governance and Control

Modern data protection designed for self-service requires intelligent, consolidated oversight of data and service levels across the business to ensure protection SLO compliance is met.  Data Protection Suite for Applications provides self-service data protection capabilities with global oversight to maximize efficiency, streamline operations and ensure consistent service level compliance.  With the ability to discover physical and virtual SQL and Oracle databases, as well as VMware copies, administrators receive faster time to value via automated VM discovery and provisioning, as well as the elimination of duplicate work streams and the creation of unnecessary silos of storage by sending data directly to Data Domain.

Data Protection Suite for Applications non-disruptively discovers copies across the enterprise and automates protection SLO compliance.  Existing data copies are non-disruptively discovered to gain consolidated oversight of what already exists in the environment.  This also allows admins to maintain self-service by enabling storage administrators and DBAs to continue creating copies from their native interfaces instead of inserting a solution into the data path, and fully within the governance, SLOs and oversight of their IT data protection regime.

Empowering application owners with the ability use native tools within their applications provides the control they desire, including the ability to set, monitor and enforce SLOs.  And, by enabling cooperation and coordination between protection administrators and data owners, administrative overhead is reduced.

Summary

Architected for the modern and software driven data center, Dell EMC data protection provides automation across the entire data protection stack, delivers simpler scalability and faster performance, and protection for a broader scope of VMware workloads, including workloads in the cloud and mission-critical I/O intensive applications.

About the Author: Beth Phalen

Beth Phalen is President and GM of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. She is responsible for the data protection portfolio that includes Data Protection Suite, Integrated Data Protection Appliance, Recoverpoint and Data Domain. Beth is responsible for leading a global team to deliver Dell EMC’s industry leading data protection portfolio to customers worldwide. In this capacity she oversees the engineering marketing and product management teams, drives the portfolio strategy and works closely with sales and global services to ensure successful end to end execution of the business.