How Enterprises respond to data protection challenges

Data is the core of today's enterprises and can improve the flexibility and decision-making level of enterprises. However, the explosive growth of data (including structured and unstructured data) increases the difficulty of data protection and storage.

Today, enterprises need to process large and large files every day. The harsh reality puts a huge pressure on the IT resources of enterprises. For example, it takes 24 hours to back up a TB data set through a 10 Gb connection, and daily backup operations cannot be performed during this period.

In addition, despite the rapid development of storage and recovery technologies, we do not know whether the data that has been stored for a long time (such as 20 years) can be safely and reliably restored.

ESG's latest report on the Modernization Trend of Data Protection focuses on the following issues:

-Increase in data volume: more than half of Middle-end market respondents said their total data volume has exceeded 10 TB, and nearly half of enterprises said they have more than TB of data to be managed.

-Multiple challenges: enterprises still face a series of challenges, including how to face data growth and the resulting costs, and how to shorten the backup time, and how to keep up with the pace of data growth and protect it in a timely manner.

-Tape backup Persistence: although only 10% of enterprises use tape as their only backup storage medium, tape remains an integral part of many enterprise data protection strategies. In fact, nearly 75% of enterprises use disk storage as the primary data protection method, and 56% use tape as a storage layer in the backup process.

Data growth and the development of other technologies will bring huge challenges, such as server virtualization, which limits the availability of server physical resources. By narrowing down the backup window, this makes it difficult for enterprises to ensure recovery speed and reliability.

Most companies adopt short-term, fragmented solutions to address these challenges, but ultimately result in high costs and inefficient management. When talking about data backup, most enterprises follow a one-size-fits-all incremental data backup solution. However, not all data is equally important-for enterprises, some data may be more critical and require more rigorous protection.

Enterprises need a comprehensive data protection method that considers the amount of data and data types that flow through each system every day. HDS developed the following three-pronged data protection methods:

1. Reduce the data volume that requires replication Protection

The first step is to determine which data blocks are mission-critical data blocks and require more active backup and protection.

By moving inactive unstructured data, enterprises can significantly reduce the amount of data to be protected. Even so, the key step for this method is to select a content platform with built-in data protection function, which allows enterprises to store inactive but important data for a long time, it also shortens backup time, reduces infrastructure usage, and recycles expensive level-1 storage layers.

2. Application-aware and storage-based protection solutions

Snapshots and replication tools based on storage systems are increasingly used to supplement traditional data protection solutions, however, various new tools on the market vary in terms of functions, automation level, script requirements, hardware support, and Application Awareness.

As data grows exponentially in today's business environment, applying the sensor snapshot management solution to optimize, centralize, and simplify data on different storage platforms.

These solutions allow enterprises to automatically integrate Application Intelligence and hardware snapshots, minimize management configuration, and reduce script requirements. More importantly, they allow enterprises to restore all or part of data while maintaining application consistency.

3. Continuous Data Protection

In a traditional backup software architecture, data is replicated during a protected or backup window. To relieve the backup infrastructure load, the system inserts Incremental Backup between full backups. However, this method will generate an interdependent backup chain, which may lead to data loss and other problems.

By going beyond the predefined batch backup tasks and providing automated real-time data protection, modern backup solutions can solve this problem. It should include continuous data protection (CDP), real-time backup, and image data path. Enterprises can deploy the incremental forever policy, without re-creating a complete backup image during recovery, so there is no additional overhead.

Using these policies can simplify the technology selection process, because there are not many comprehensive storage and backup solutions on the market that meet the above requirements. The selected solution must be reliable and flexible enough to keep up with the increasing data protection requirements of enterprises. The method described here helps enterprises migrate from maintaining a large number of expensive and bulky data islands to an optimized solution. It features simplified management and reduced operating costs, and provides absolutely reliable data protection.