
Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization - A Contributed Series by DataCore Software
To Protect and Serve - Storage Hypervisors and the Data Protection Imperative - written by DataCore Software President and CEO George
Teixeira
For most people, the motto “to protect and serve”
automatically brings up the image of a police car, but for IT professionals it
might just as well be blazoned on the hardware and software of their storage
infrastructure. The ever-increasing computer-dependence of business has pushed
data protection and business continuity to top of mind in the IT world, and
storage is a major player in the quest to preserve the integrity and
availability of data assets.
But it can be a major headache, as well. It’s not that
there aren’t good solutions for assuring storage availability, data protection,
and data recovery. What’s problematic is assembling them into an affordable,
consistent, and maintainable defense in depth to minimize “time to data:” how
long it takes after an interruption to recover data, bring applications back up,
and reconnect users.
This is especially difficult given the skyrocketing
growth of storage capacity, driven both by server virtualization and increasing
regulatory pressures for data retention. This keeps IT scrambling to maintain
data protection as new storage hardware—and new types of storage, like flash and
DRAM solid state drives—comes online. Too often, businesses find themselves
locked into expensive single-vendor solutions because they can see no other way
to provide a coherent strategy for configuring, monitoring, and managing all the
necessary data replication functions.
But there is another way: the storage hypervisor. This is software that does for storage
hardware what hypervisors like VMware, XenServer, and Hyper-V do for servers:
transform static hardware platforms into rapidly provisioned and highly
available virtual resources. A storage hypervisor like DataCore SANsymphony™-V
provides defense in depth for all your storage hardware—present and future—that
can be configured and managed from a single console.
For the most common
kind of data disaster, user and application errors, SANsymphony provides
Continuous Data Protection, allowing you to “rewind” any virtual disk back to
the moment before disruption. Stikeman-Elliott, a leading Canadian business law firm, uses
this capability to provide “zero-time backups.”
For a localized
interruption, such as hardware failure, broken water pipes, and the like,
SANsymphony provides real-time synchronous replication across a LAN or
metropolitan area network. At Amnet Technology Solutions, a private cloud
platform provider specializing in cloud-based, managed IT services, DataCore’s
synchronous replication is an important part of the confidence customers have in
the company’s cloud services.
For large-scale “CNN-level” disasters,
SANsymphony offers asynchronous replication across a WAN to a disaster-recovery
(DR) site or the cloud. In fact, just this week DataCore announced that Amnet has deployed the latest version
of the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor (version 8.1) to meet an increasing
demand for offsite replication and disaster recovery. The company enlisted
DataCore’s newest technology to build a scalable, easy-to-use backup and
replication platform that rivals the speed of purpose-built backup systems at a
cost savings of 30 percent. (Full case study here.)
SANsymphony also enables simple, non-disruptive
testing of your data protection strategy, and all of this comes “out of the
box,” without the need to cobble together third-party point solutions or try to
get different storage vendors’ software to cooperate.
For an in-depth introduction to data protection and how a
storage hypervisor can help you manage it, check out Part Four of Storage
Virtualization for Rock Stars by Jon Toigo of the Data Management Institute: The Data Protection Imperative.
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About the Author
George Teixeira is President and CEO of DataCore Software. See full bio here.