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I am impressed with the professionalism of your staff. The questions [in the interview] were well thought out and addressed the specifics of my answers to the survey questions. I found your team to be well prepared and sufficiently well versed in the technologies we are planning to employ to make the interview comfortable and very pleasant.
Data Protection
Includes Backup/Recovery, Archiving, DPM, VTL, CDP, Data De-duplication, DRM.
Data is the lifeblood of an enterprise. And yet data has been protected in essentially the same fashion over the past two decades, i.e. by backing it up to tape and sending the tapes offsite. This method alone is no longer adequate and a spade of new technologies has become available in the last five years. These new technologies are already transforming the way data is protected, how long it is kept online, how it is archived. Recovery Management has emerged as a new discipline focused on recovering data rather than copying data. The new compliance requirements are essentially requiring companies of all sizes to upgrade their data protection infrastructures or be subject to huge fines. The level of innovation in this space is torrid. Taneja Group covers this space from end to end and has defined many of the new categories that now are considered the norm. The analysts that cover this space have deep industry backgrounds in developing and marketing these technologies.
The Easy Cloud For Complete File Data Protection: Igneous Systems Backs-up AND Archives All Your NAS
When we look at all the dollars being spent on endless NAS capacity growth, and the increasingly complex (and mostly unrealistic) file protection schemes that go along, we find most enterprises aren’t happy with their status quo. And while cloud storage seems so attractive theoretically, making big changes to a stable NAS storage architecture can be both costly and present enough risk to keep many stuck endlessly growing their primary filers. Cloud gateways can help offload capacity, yet they add operational complexity and are ultimately only half-way solutions.
What file-dependent enterprises really need is a true hybrid solution that backs on-premise primary NAS with hybrid cloud secondary storage to provide a secure, reliable, elastic, scalable, and – above all – a simply seamless solution. Ideally we would want a drop-in solution that was remotely managed, paid for by subscription and highly performant – all while automatically backing-up (and/or archiving) all existing primary NAS storage. In other words, enterprises don’t want to rip and replace working primary NAS solutions, but they do want to easily offload and extend them with superior cloud-shaped secondary storage.
When it comes to an enterprise’s cloud adoption journey, we can recommend that “hybrid cloud” storage services be adopted first to address longstanding challenges with NAS file data protection. While many enterprises have reasonable backup solutions for block (and sometimes VM images/disks), reliable data protection for fast growing file is much harder due to trends towards bigger data repositories, faster streaming data, global sharing requirements, and increasingly tighter SLA’s (not to mention shrinking backup windows). Igneous Systems promises to help filer-dependent enterprises keep up with all their file protection challenges with their Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud that features integrated enterprise file backup and archive.
Igneous Systems’ storage layer integrates several key technologies – highly efficient, scalable, remotely managed object storage; built-in tiering and file movement not just on the back-end to public clouds, but also on the front-end from existing primary NAS arrays; remote management as-a-service to offload IT staff; and all necessary file archive and backup automation.
And Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud is also a first-class object store with valuable features like built-in global meta-data search. However, here we’ll focus on how Igneous Backup and Igneous Archive services is used to solve gaping holes in traditional approaches to NAS backup and archive.
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Companies Improve Data Protection and More with Cohesity
We talked to six companies that have implemented Cohesity DataProtect and/or the Cohesity DataPlatform. When these companies evaluated Cohesity, their highest priority was reducing storage costs and improving data protection. To truly modernize their secondary storage infrastructure, they also recognized the importance of having a scalable, all-in-one solution that could both consolidate and better manage their entire secondary data environment.
Prior to implementing Cohesity, many of the companies we interviewed had significant challenges with the high cost of their secondary storage. Several factors contributed to the high costs including the need to license multiple products, inadequate storage reduction, the need for professional services and extensive training, difficulty scaling and maintaining systems and adding capacity to expensive primary storage for lower-performance services, such as group file shares.
In addition to lower storage costs, all the companies we talked to also wanted a better data protection solution. Many companies were struggling with slow backup speeds, insufficient recovery times and cumbersome data archival methods. Solution complexity and high operational overhead was also a major issue. To address these issues, companies wanted a unified data protection solution that offered better backup performance, instant data recovery, simplified management, and seamless cloud integration for long-term data retention.
Companies also wanted to improve overall secondary storage management and they shared a common goal of combining secondary storage workloads under one roof. Depending on their environment and their operational needs, their objectives outside of data protection included providing self-service access to copies of production data for on-demand environments (such as test/dev), using secondary storage for file services and leveraging indexing and advanced search and analytics to find out-of-place confidential data and ensure data compliance.
Cohesity customers found that the key to addressing these challenges and needs is Cohesity’s Hyperconverged Secondary Storage. Cohesity is a pioneer of Hyperconverged Secondary Storage, a new category of secondary storage based on a webscale, distributed file system that scales linearly and provides global data deduplication and automatic indexing as well as advanced search and analytics and policy-based management of all secondary storage workloads. These capabilities combine to provide a single system that efficiently stores, manages, and understands all data copies and workflows residing in a secondary storage environment – whether the data is on-premises or in the cloud. There are no point products, therefore less complexity and lower licensing costs.
It’s a compelling value proposition, and importantly, every company we talked to stated that Cohesity has met and exceeded their expectations and has helped them rapidly evolve their data protection and overall secondary data management. To learn about each customer’s journey, we examined their business needs, their data center environment, their key challenges, the reasons they chose Cohesity, and the value they have derived. Read on to learn more about their experience.
Petabyte-Scale Backup Storage Without Compromise: A Look at Scality RING for Enterprise Backup
Traditional backup storage is being challenged by the immense growth of data. These solutions including tape, RAID devices that are gated by controllers and dedicated storage appliances simply aren’t designed for today’s enterprise backup storage at petabyte levels, especially when that data lives in geographically distributed environments. This insufficiency is due in large part to inefficiency and limited data protection, as well as the limited scalability and the lack of flexibility of these traditional storage solutions.
These constraints can lead to multiple processes and many storage systems to manage. Storage silos develop as a result, creating complexity, increasing operational costs and adding risk. It is not unusual for companies to have 10-20 different storage systems to achieve petabyte storage capacity, which is inefficient from a management point of view. And if companies want to move data from one storage system to another, the migration process can take a lot of time and place even more demand on data center resources.
And the concerns go beyond management complexity. Companies face higher capital costs due to relatively high priced proprietary storage hardware, and worse, limited fault tolerance, which can lead to data loss if a system incurs simultaneous disk failures. Slow access speeds also present a major challenge if IT teams need to restore large amounts of data from tape while maintaining production environments. As a result, midsized companies, large enterprises and service providers that experience these issues have begun to shift to software-defined storage solutions and scale-out object storage technology that addresses the shortcomings of traditional backup storage.
Software-defined scale out storage is attractive for large-scale data backup because these storage solutions offer linear performance and hardware independence – two core capabilities that drive tremendous scalability and enable cost-effective storage solutions. Add to this the high fault tolerance of object storage platforms, and it’s easy to see why software-defined object storage solutions are rapidly becoming the preferred backup storage approach for petabyte-scale data environments. A recent Taneja Group survey underscores the benefits of software-defined scale out storage. IT professionals indicated that the top benefits of software-defined, scale-out architecture on industry standard servers are a high level of flexibility (34%), low cost of deployment (34%), modular scalability (32%), and ability to purchase hardware separate from software (32%).
Going a step further, the Scality backup storage solution built upon the Scality RING platform offers the rare combination of scalability, durability and affordability plus the flexibility to handle mixed workloads at petabyte-scale. Scality backup storage achieves this by supporting multiple file and object protocols so companies can backup files, objects and VMs, leveraging a scale-out file system that delivers linear performance as system capacity increases, offering advanced data protection for extreme fault tolerance, enabling hardware independence for better price performance and providing auto balancing that enables migration-free hardware upgrades.
In this paper, we will look at the limitations of backup appliances and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and the key requirements for backup storage at petabyte-scale. We will also study the Scality RING software-defined architecture and provide an overview of the Scality backup storage solution.
DP Designed for Flash - Better Together: HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and StoreOnce System
Flash technology has burst on the IT scene within the past few years with a vengeance. Initially seen simply as a replacement for HDDs, flash now is triggering IT and business to rethink a lot of practices that have been well established for decades. One of those is data protection. Do you protect data the same way when it is sitting on flash as you did when HDDs ruled the day? How do you take into account that at raw cost/capacity levels, flash is still more expensive than HDDs? Do data deduplication and compression technologies change how you work with flash? Does the fact that flash technology is injected most often to alleviate severe application performance issues require you to rethink how you should protect, manage, and move this data?
These questions apply across the board when flash is injected into storage arrays but even more so when you consider all-flash arrays (AFAs), which are often associated with the most mission-critical applications an enterprise possesses. The expectations for application service levels and data protection recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are vastly different in these environments. Given this, are existing data protection tools adequate? Or is there a better way to utilize these expensive assets and yet achieve far superior results? The short answer is yes to both.
In this Opinion piece we will focus on answering these questions broadly through the data protection lens. We will then look at a specific case of how data protection can be designed with flash in mind by considering the combination of flash-optimized HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HPE StoreOnce System backup appliances, and HPE Recovery Management Central (RMC) software. These elements combine to produce an exceptional solution that meets the stringent application service requirements and data protection RTOs and RPOs that one finds in flash storage environments while keeping costs in check.
Transforming the Data Center: SimpliVity Delivers Hyperconverged Platform with Native DP
Hyperconvergence has come a long way in the past five years. Growth rates are astronomical and customers are replacing traditional three-layer configurations with hyperconverged solutions at record numbers. But not all hyperconverged solutions in the market are alike. As the market matures, this fact is coming to light. Of course, all hyperconverged solutions tightly integrate compute and storage (that is par for the course) but beyond that similarities end quickly.
One of the striking differences between SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure architecture and others is the tight integration of data protection functionality. The DNA for that is built in from the very start: SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure systems perform inline deduplication and compression of data at the time of data creation. Thereafter, data is kept in the “reduced” state throughout its lifecycle. This has serious positive implications on latency, performance, and bandwidth but equally importantly, it transforms data protection and other secondary uses of data.
At Taneja Group, we have been very aware of this differentiating feature of SimpliVity’s solution. So when we were asked to interview five SimpliVity customers to determine if they were getting tangible benefits (or not), we jumped at the opportunity.
This Field Report is about their experiences. We must state at the beginning that we focused primarily on their data protection experiences in this report. Hyperconvergence is all about simplicity and cost reduction. But SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure also eliminated another big headache: data protection. These customers may not have bought SimpliVity for data protection purposes, but the fact that they were essentially able to get rid of all their other data protection products was a very pleasant surprise for them. That was a big plus for these customers. To be sure, data protection is not simply backup and restore but also includes a number of other functions such as replication, DR, WAN optimization, and more.
For a broader understanding of SimpliVity’s product capabilities, other Taneja Group write-ups are available. This one focuses on data protection. Read on for these five customers’ experiences.
The HPE Solution to Backup Complexity and Scale: HPE Data Protector and StoreOnce
There are a lot of game-changing trends in IT today including mobility, cloud, and big data analytics. As a result, IT architectures, data centers, and data processing are all becoming more complex – increasingly dynamic, heterogeneous, and distributed. For all IT organizations, achieving great success today depends on staying in control of rapidly growing and faster flowing data.
While there are many ways for IT technology and solution providers to help clients depending on their maturity, size, industry, and key business applications, every IT organization has to wrestle with BURA (Backup, Recovery, and Archiving). Protecting and preserving the value of data is a key business requirement even as the types, amounts, and uses of that data evolve and grow.
For IT organizations, BURA is an ever-present, huge, and growing challenge. Unfortunately, implementing a thorough and competent BURA solution often requires piecing and patching together multiple vendor products and solutions. These never quite fully address the many disparate needs of most organizations nor manage to be very simple or cost-effective to operate. Here is where we see HPE as a key vendor today with all the right parts coming together to create a significant change in the BURA marketplace.
First, HPE is pulling together its top-notch products into a user-ready “solution” that marries both StoreOnce and Data Protector. For those working with either or both of those separately in the past in conjunction with other vendor’s products, it’s no surprise that they each compete favorably one-on-one with other products in the market, but together as an integrated joint solution they beat the best competitor offerings.
But HPE hasn’t just bundled products into solutions, it is undergoing a seismic shift in culture that revitalizes its total approach to market. From product to services to support, HPE people have taken to heart a “customer first” message to provide a truly solution-focused HPE experience. One support call, one ticket, one project manager, addressing the customer’s needs regardless of what internal HPE business unit components are in the “box”. And significantly, this approach elevates HPE from just being a supplier of best-of-breed products into an enterprise-level trusted solution provider addressing business problems head-on. HPE is perhaps the only company completely able to deliver a breadth of solutions spanning IT from top to bottom out of their own internal world-class product lines.
In this report, we’ll examine first why HPE StoreOnce and Data Protector products are truly game changing on their own rights. Then, we will look at why they get even “better together” as a complete BURA solution that can be more flexibly deployed to meet backup challenges than any other solution in the market today.