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From the Front Lines
Data Protection
By Greg Schulz - Sr. Advisor StorageIO
The amount of data being generated, processed, moved, stored and retained for longer periods of time is growing exponentially. Consumers of IT services expect their applications and data to be secure and available when and where they need them. This growing trend makes data storage and data protection more critical than ever.
The fundamental role of storage is to preserve, protect and serve data in a safe, secure and cost-effective manner. The focus of data protection is to ensure the integrity, availability and accessibility of both active and inactive data.
The techniques and technologies that enable data protection include:
- High-availability features along with RAID for data accessibility
- Disk-based backup/restore for physical, virtual and cloud environments
- Data footprint reduction using archiving, compression and deduplication
- Space-saving snapshots integrated with replication and mirroring
- Integration of snapshots with applications and virtual machines
- Data protection management tools that provide insight and awareness
Data protection challenges
One of the most common data protection challenges companies face today is how to balance the cost of protection against various threats and regulatory and other compliance requirements with the demand to securely serve and preserve more data for longer periods of time. Simply cutting costs is a short-term tactical approach, but it does not produce long-term benefits.
Other challenges related to protecting data and applications in physical, virtual and cloud environments include:
- Outages resulting from human error or design deficiency
- An increase in mobile-generated and -accessed information services
- Cloud, virtualized, dynamic and flexible computing
Data protection opportunities/solutions
In addition to stretching budgets to support an increased demand for data, IT organizations also have to maintain quality-of-service requirements and service-level objectives. This can be addressed through data protection metrics that include recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.
Additional data protection steps organizations can take include:
- Modernizing data protection, including backup/restore as well as business continuity and disaster recovery
- Reducing the cost of services delivered via improved efficiencies
- Leveraging cloud and virtualization technologies to mask complexities
Conclusion
There is no time like the present to reassess, redesign, modernize or reconfigure your data protection environment, particularly if you are planning on or have already initiated a server or desktop virtualization initiative. By doing so, you can reduce overhead, complexity and cost.
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