By Cat Yong
A worldwide total cost of USD 1.1 trillion to manage and protect information, is simply not viable, especially given the rapid growth of big data which is expected to further accelerate over the next few years at least.
This explosion is already causing storage and backup solutions to increase as much as 52 percent, year on year. With technology trends like cloud computing, mobility and virtualisation further complicating operations, how well are storage and backup solutions coping?
Is heavy capital expenditure and increased operating expenditure to deal with mind numbing complexity, all that organisations have to look forward to over the next few years?
The case for a holistic approach
Data protection has to include the whole gamut of activities from securing data, all the way to backing it up and making it available when needed.
Gartner VP of storage technologies and strategies, Dave Russell had opined, “Organisations small and large need holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate solutions.”
Symantec Malaysia’s Senior Technical Consultant, Koh Ee Laine also added during a face-to-face interview, that some solutions can only address physical IT environments and not virtualised environments.
“So you need a centralised platform that would be able to protect both environments, end-to-end.”
Disparate solutions create further complexity, because businesses have added task of ensuring compatibility of the various storage tiers, the operating systems, hardware, as well as manage the different pricings and different licenses.
Koh said, “Our backup appliances aim to eliminate all these backup complexity challenges.”
Having carved a name for itself in the backup and recovery solutions space with its NetBackup software solution, Symantec had proceeded to build a hardware appliance around it, with storage, server and management software all bundled in.
The third generation of this backup appliance, the Symantec NetBackup 5230 Appliance is expected to be launched in Malaysia before end of 2013. It now also comes with multiple configuration options, the most basic being a 4TB model that is able to scale up as the business grows.
Simplicity and choice
Symantec’s NetBackup appliance boasts being able to be up and running in 20 minutes, as opposed to days when customers decide to acquire the different hardware components and integrate them all together, by themselves. “Compatibility checks, firmware updates, integration testing … all this is pre-done for you,” said Koh, adding that customers would only need to configure the appliance.
Customers who have already made hardware investments could also opt instead for the latest NetBackup 7.5 version software.
Better protection in virtual environments
There are a few tasks that Symantec claims to be able to do better. One of this is more intelligent deduplication thanks to ‘single-pass backup’ capability.
Koh explained, “What’s unique about our deduplication is that it is content aware.” Being content-aware saves time as granular recovery at the file-level is possible, so a single file can be restored without the whole virtual machine having to be restored, for example.
Businesses also have a choice of where they want deduplication to happen, be it on the client server they are protecting or the media server /backup appliance. “For bandwidth and storage savings, businesses have the option to do deduplication at the client server now instead of only at the backup appliance which was usually the case before,” said Koh.
Besides a built-in WAN optimisation solution for faster transfer rate of backups to the cloud and replication site, a nifty feature called NetBackup 7.5 Accelerator helps quicken the whole backup and recovery processes up to a 100 times. This is especially for businesses which does incremental backups of large file servers with terabytes upon terabytes worth of data.
A close collaboration with virtualisation vendor, VMWare, had also produced the V-Ray technology which enables end-to-end protection across physical and vSphere virtual IT environments.
Koh described, “V-ray minimises down time. During vSphere backups there is no need for a staging space (extra media server) to stitch everything together. Organisations can back up their virtual machines directly.”
Symantec’s v-Ray is the technology that enables visibility into virtual machines, so businesses can recover and see up to the individual file and object level, what they have to protect.
