Tag: "NetWorker"

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.

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Sep 01, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

Accelerating Backup Efficiency


EMC's announcement on accelerating your backup efficiency hits some very important concepts to help users make significant progress in solving some key backup challenges.

A lot has been said over the last 18 months regarding an inflection point, where the growth of data is out pacing the capabilities of traditional backup technologies.  This has driven the 'one size does not fit all' belief when it comes to backup technology for your infrastructure.  Vendors talk about utilizing new technologies such as disk based backup, VTL (virtual tape libraries), deduplication and data protection management in order to improve the backup process.  While each of these technologies can help to improve the process, customers need to act faster in order catch up with the growth of data.

It’s not to say run out and buy one of each of these technologies and collectively they will solve your all your backup challenges.  The first and perhaps the most important thing is to assess your backup environment.  The reason there is not a one size fits all policy when it comes to backup is because different data types behave differently with different backup technologies.  Data deduplication is great, but it can work much better when it is applied in the proper manner.  A combination of source and target deduplication can complement one another to maximize your backup efficiency.  As an example, by leveraging source based deduplication for the proper data in your environment can give you a significant number of cycles back to your traditional backup software and improve performance on data types that aren't a good fit for source based deduplication.  So the message is, use assessment services to help you gain a realistic understanding of your data profile that allows you to choose the right deduplication for your environment.  Additionally, make sure the tools that you use to understand your deduplication efficiency utilize similar algorithms as the products you will use in your environment so there are no surprises.

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May 19, 2009 | 0 comments View Post