Data Protection for the Data Fabric

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the NetApp UK partner academies in Manchester and London. I was pleasantly surprised by the venues, the presenters, the content presented and the number of attendees. 

One thing that was crystal clear is that NetApp are fully focused on enabling customers to build their Data Fabric, regardless of the vendors involved. They have recognised that data is distributed, dynamic and diverse and that each customer is unique, but all are looking to build and enhance a Data Fabric to enable digital transformation. 

Whilst NetApp understand they have the vehicles to store and serve that data quickly and efficiently with their AFF arrays, HCI solutions and Cloud volumes, they are embracing partners such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Equinix and Catalogic (of course!) to deliver solutions alongside NetApp as part of a customers Data Fabric. 

One customer who has built a Data Fabric based on NetApp is Ducati. Data is a key driver for Ducati and helps determine the construction of the bikes, the performance of the riders and strategy of the team. 
To maximise the impact of Data on the track, Ducati has partnered with NetApp to optimise the team's Data Fabric and meet its unique and expanding data management needs. 
Here's a short video that's well worth a watch with Piergiorgio Grossi explaining how Ducati are transforming the world of racing with data. 

The only spanner in the works for Ducati at the moment seems to be Marc Marquez!
Stick Jack Miller on that Red bike for 2020 and I think they have a good chance of gaining that elusive MotoGP world championship, it's been 12 years since Casey Stoner won it on the Ducati in 2007 (now I feel old!) 
But enough about MotoGP!

In terms of customers Data Fabric's data protection is a key element, it's an element that Catalogic DPX can deliver with our patented block-level incremental backups enabling quicker and more efficient data protection and data recovery capabilities.

DPX extends data protection for the Data Fabric to create a universal data protection, DR and copy services solution. 
By delivering rapid, low-impact backup and near instant recovery, DPX provides modern data protection for the data centre, remote office or cloud. 
DPX can send backup data directly to ONTAP based devices (physical or cloud), or via the vStor software-defined backup repository we can make use of any block based storage. 
Also DPX agents can also replace end-of-life OSSV agents and support the latest versions of ONTAP, this is still a problem a lot of NetApp users are having when moving from 7-Mode to cDOT due to OSSV not being supported on cDOT.  

An overview of the architecture of DPX is shown below

Pretty neat eh! With DPX block-level, file-level, NDMP and agentless VMware backups result in support for almost every operating system.
Heterogenous application-aware support means the vast majority of enterprise applications are supported including Oracle, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Db2, Notes, SAP and more - see details here
So as you can see most bases are covered with DPX.

Our recovery capabilities are second to none with instant access, instant and full virtualization meaning we can in the event of a disaster get the Data Fabric back online as quickly as possible ensuring even the most stringent RTOs are achievable. 

We also support bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware i.e. physical to physical or physical to virtual so in the event your mission critical system running on an a physical system fails you can quickly get back online as a virtual system. 

DPX 4.5.5 has recently been released and there's never been a better time to check out the most comprehensive and affordable data protection solution available for the Data Fabric.

The latest release includes:

✅vSphere plugin for agentless backup

✅Rapid Return to Production (RRP) wizard for agentless

✅Exchange 2019 support

✅SQL Always On Cluster support

Full details on the updates in the release are available here 

If you want to know anything in relation to data protection for the Data Fabric, would like a demo or a free trial of DPX setting up please do feel free to ping me via wbush@catalogicsoftware.com