A Data Protection Reference Architecture – The Final Chapter
The Architecture
This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.
This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things. It can help you begin to classify your data and align your data to your business objectives. It also lets you begin to identify what data or data services in your environment that may be more important to you than others and based on this help you to choose areas you may want to outsource or move to the cloud.
As you can tell, there really is not one solution for meeting all your data protection needs. The challenge comes with managing multiple solutions in an effort to meet your business objectives. While there are only a few technologies available that allow you to manage your environment across all your RPOs and RTOs, it is important that I point out EMC’s NetWorker is able to do this, centralizing your data protection infrastructure for ease of management. It allows you to manage traditional backup, source based deduplicated backup with Avamar, CDP with RecoverPoint, as well as the EMC disk libraries and tape where the data is stored. Now, I am not saying that NetWorker solves all of your data protection challenges, nor am I suggesting that replacing one traditional backup technology for another is the right answer, but what I am saying is that if you’re looking to have all the feature functionality required to meet all your business objectives and you want easier management, NetWorker is one avenue to get you there. Additionally, the underlying image of the triangle represents data protection management. Putting all the new technology in place is one thing, managing it, and ensuring you are now meeting your business needs is another. EMC's Data Protection Advisor can help here as well.
This diagram can help customers layout a new, better data protection schema for their environment and start thinking about data protection a bit more strategically versus tactically. It can also help vendors speak to customers about how they should look at their environment in order to identify specific challenges and the means they need to alleviate these challenges , taking backup, beyond.
Anything with “Final Chapter” in the title is pompous and delusional. Data Protection is a dynamic process that is always changing in how it is accomplished. A claim of “final chapter” and then “emphasizing” that Networker achieves all data protection RPO/RTO’s wreaks of vendor bias. This is nothing more than an article to promote EMC’s products, with no real insight into helping IT architects get a true handle on their data protection needs.
Gee Tom, I am really sorry you feel this way. Apparently however you are not a frequent reader of my blog. I have always said, and will continue to always say that backup is an evolutionary process. This comes out in all my postings. The title of the blog post was just to end a multi-segmented piece that spoke about one way to develop a reference architecture that didn’t call out products, but provided IT professionals a way to look at their environment and provide insight as to how one may approach classifying data, archiving data (removing it out of the backup stream) and apply the right technology, based on use case to the right ‘tier’ or value of data.
Also, if you re-read the comments I made about NetWorker, is specifically call out that there is absolutely no sense in trading out one incumbent backup product for another UNLESS there is some very valuable reason for doing so. The value with NetWorker is that it is one of the ONLY products available that allow you to manage an incumbent backup product, a source based deduplication product, a replication or CDP technology from one console and meet all your RPO’s. I never said it was the best for doing this, but if a customer wanted this, it is possible.
Finally, yes, I do work for EMC and I gain a lot of insight by working here because I am in front of many customers. The concepts I write about apply to all areas of IT and it does just so happen that over the last 8 years, EMC has made some significant investments that allow customers to tackle and solve these challenges.
I am surprised at your reaction given Sun is one of NetWorkers #1 resellers.