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Big Data: Time to Replace the Short Term Backup Band-Aid with a Unified Approach
Published Jun 13, 2012
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IT resources are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the massive hike in data volumes. Many companies in the Middle East are struggling to meet backup deadlines and scan times alone can contribute significantly to backup windows. Organisations are now fighting against rising data management capital costs whilst trying to focus operationally on managing more data. The heightened value of information today also puts more pressure on staff to meet the stringent SLA’s relating to the retention and recovery of mission critical data. Put simply, the business risk from poor data management has never been so great.
According to IDC, the quantity of digital archive data being created is growing at an alarming rate - 4 x the current volume to retain and search in 3 years - so if businesses want to be in a position to efficiently overcome the backup challenges of tomorrow, they need to take a different approach today.
Organisations often deploy a number of different products to solve backup and restore issues whilst seeking to also improve archive and storage resource management capabilities. Snapshot technology can certainly help to tackle shrinking backup windows and de-duplication is proven to reduce the amount of data being stored for at least short terms backups. Source-side de-dupe can minimizes network and data activity and archiving is still one of the best ways to reduce the amount of old data on primary cost stores.
Whilst these technologies alleviate the problem, implementing solutions from multiple vendors can in turn create inefficient data silos that are difficult to manage. Most importantly perhaps, they don’t address the bigger problem of too much data being processed too many times, or being stored for the wrong period of time on the wrong media.
The answer to the Big Data challenge is that instead of looking for short term band-aids for existing solutions, companies should consider a converged process for backup, archive and reporting. By only reading and/or moving data once this unified approach to data management can eliminate redundant processes and speed up operations; reducing storage costs and simplifying management policies.
A single data policy enables organisations to scan, copy, index, analyse and store data once. It also enables data analytics to be performed classifying the data and automatically supplying archive policies for data tiering that will ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership.
In-built intelligent data collection also reduces scan times enabling companies to keep within incremental backup windows. The single pass scan routine for backup, archive and reporting serves to reduce server loads whilst integrating, source-side de-duplication and synthetic full back-ups minimises server and network load.
Instead of just moving the pain point, a converged solution can reduce the combined time typically required to manage backup, archive and report by more than 50% - helping companies to affordably protect, manage and access data on systems that have otherwise become ‘too big’.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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