How does ECX reduce stress for IT teams?

In this day and age, every business generates and harvests data. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Nvidia, and Tesla are the kind of companies that are leaders of the data economy. They are harvesting data to its full extent and continue to find ways of growing their business via data. Worldwide data expected to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025, representing a 61 percent compound annual growth rate according to IDC

People often forget that a lot of this data is simply made up of copies of existing data. Why do copies of data exist? For multiple reasons, the most common reasons include: 

• Backup and Compliance
• Disaster Recovery
• Reporting
• Analytics
• Test & Development
• DevOps &
• Training

To put the scope of how much data is copy data in context, IDC has found that 60 percent of storage is dedicated to managing copies of data--at $55 billion per year collectively.

The most easily observable problem with copy data is there is too much of it. Data reduction capabilities, such as compression and deduplication, are helping reduce the burden of copies, copy data still causes many organizations unwanted stress and costs - the core reasons for these being:

• Storage growth
• Security vulnerabilities
• Compliance risks and 
• Shadow IT

So, what can companies do to manage and harvest data better to reduce the stress and costs associated with Copy Data? 

vStor – The beating heart of our data protection solution

At the heart of every data protection solution is the repository where the data the data protection solution is protecting resides. The beating heart of Catalogic's data protection solution DPX is the vStor.

Our vStor backup repository is a flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players. 

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block based storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support. 
vStor can be architected to meet your needs. We support physical severs and virtual servers and any form of block storage. 
If you are interested in a dedicated appliance we also offer 3 pre-built vStor appliances – 24TB, 48TB and 100TB. See more details on those here

Backup and Replication - Why do I need them both?

In this blog post I discuss backup and replication technologies, the purposes of both, what I recommend using and how some vendors are bundling the two functions when not necessarily needed.

The purposes of backup and replication often become blurred due to misuse or misunderstanding of the terms. I appreciate at this point I'm teaching many of you how to suck eggs but bare with me, I promise it gets interesting! 

A backup is a point in time copy of data that enables recovery in a data loss event and also the ability to recover from an earlier point in time so in the event data is changed or becomes corrupted it can be recovered. Typically backup is enabled via a software product or dedicated hardware appliance.

Replication can be a real time or point in time replica of data. In the event of data loss or corruption, data can quickly be brought back online via the replica. Replication if correctly implemented enables a quicker recovery time objective than backup and lower recovery point objective if real time replication is configured. Typically replication is enabled via a software product, built-in application capabilities or via built-in storage mirroring capabilities.

A common question I get from executives is so why do I need both?
The answer to this depends on the regulatory requirements of the business and sector you work in and also the required recovery time objective and recovery point objective of your business. However, in the majority of environments businesses use a combination of backup and replication technologies to provide a comprehensive business continuity plan.
The average cost of outages as detailed via IDC for the Fortune 1000 is $100,000 per hour with the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year being $1.25 to $2.5 billion! This proves data is the lifeblood of organisations and outages these days have a very high cost to businesses. Therefore ensuring you have a real time replica of data with a tested low recovery point and recovery time objective is crucial.
Point in time replicas or backup is then used to enable the longer retention of data so businesses can recover back over a longer period in time with a lower storage and cost footprint than replication. This is required for a number of scenarios including the event of data being manually deleted via user error, data is corrupted and not noticed for a period of time, they ensure regulatory requirements are met or data has been hit via ransomware and replicated.
Both technologies are delivering SLAs to the business.

Welcome to the new VirtualVizion Blog

Hello everyone, thanks for checking out my blog. Over the coming months I will be adding posts regarding anything & everything within the world of virtualization. I am hoping to include information that everybody can benefit from. If you have any queries regarding any of the posts feel free to contact me via wbush@virtualvizion.com