Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.3 – The future of modern data protection has landed

Friday the 22nd of February 2019 saw Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.3 launched and it’s a release that again see’s the product take some major steps forward in terms of functionality.

The 6 big headlines of the release were:

• Multi Cloud offload with the ability to offload data to IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage WORM, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure for long-term data retention and disaster recovery
• Support for Microsoft Exchange Server including individual mailbox item-level restore functionality
• Optimised offload to IBM Spectrum Protect Server, removing the need for Spectrum Protect for Virtualized environments to perform the offload and enabling enhanced parallel streaming for much quicker offloads 
• Support for MongoDB enables protection and reuse of business-critical data stored in MongoDB databases
• High availability of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Server through VMware and Hyper-V high-availability services
• Enhanced RESTful API enables easier and faster time to value for reporting and analytics

A full list of all of the enhancements in 10.1.3 are available via https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSNQFQ_10.1.3/spp/r_techchg_spp.html 

The Modernisation of Data Protection

Data protection is a key business function that enables business owners and executives to sleep safe at night knowing that in the event of data loss their data can be recovered back to an acceptable recovery point, providing regular recovery testing is taking place! 

For many businesses in this day and age an acceptable recovery point is no longer days or hours but minutes or even seconds and that's due to how essential data now is to businesses in the data age. This is a result of the way data is being generated via all of us and our owned devices, that data is then harvested via organisations to gain competitive advantage and grow businesses further.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and Tesla are the sorts of companies who are leaders of the data economy and are harvesting data to its full extent and continue to find ways of growing their business via data.

Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 - What's New in the World of Spectrum Protect?

On the 15th of December IBM released Spectrum Protect 8.1.4. 

The release contains a raft of exciting enhancements for us data protection geeks.
If you're a Spectrum Protect customer using the Operations Center, Hierarchical Storage Management, Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments, Spectrum Protect for ERP, Spectrum Snapshot for Unix, Oracle & SQL or Spectrum Protect for Databases you have something to get enthused about in this release. 
Below is an overview at a very high level of the enhancements within 8.1.4.

Here I'm going to discuss a few key product updates from my perspective.

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.

Spectrum Protect Plus Announced

This week IBM made the public pre-announcement that they have a new data protection offering in Spectrum Protect Plus which will be released in Q4.

What is Spectrum Protect Plus? 

IBM are calling it the future of data protection, recovery and data reuse. 
It's a new data protection platform packaged as an OVA that simplifies VM backups for VMware vSphere and Hyper-V that can be implemented as a standalone solution or integrated with IBM Spectrum Protect for longer-term retention of data. Below is an architectural overview of how the product works.