The Data-Protection
Playbook For
Converged Storage
Key considerations for
the tech-savvy storage buyer
The future of converged storage
The converged datacenter is an advantageous choice
The volume of data you need to manage and protect is growing at a breakneck pace.. In the modern
enterprise, your data is dynamic, constantly evolving with new applications and data types;
distributed, with unique requirements for mobile, cloud, virtualization, and remote offices; and
indispensable, with zero tolerance for downtime and a need for anytime, anywhere access. While
enterprise data requirements have evolved, enterprise data protection has lagged behind, putting
one of your most valuable assets at risk.
According to IDC, companies worldwide
now spend, "$44 billion on storage
hardware and software to manage
unnecessary copies of enterprise data1."
$44Bn
1. Actifio blog article referencing IDC Whitepaper, New Research Identifies $44 Billion Dollar Copy Data Problem, June 2013
2
Modern storage is complicated
In a perfect world, your storage environment would consist of a set of highly-interoperable
storage pools. Data would flow freely between applications and locations, data-protection
processes would be simple and efficient, and data would move seamlessly and automatically
between primary and backup storage.
85%
“Despite the deployment of deduplication
technologies within conventional
enterprise storage architectures, 85% of
storage hardware purchases and 65% of
storage software purchases go to
supporting duplicate data.”
—IDC 2
Instead, the demands of a growing business have often pushed you in a different direction,
deploying point solutions with various features and capabilities to support mission-critical business
applications. This has left you with a patchwork of tier-1 storage devices, multiple discrete backup
systems, and a level of complexity you never imagined or intended. These storage silos—devices or
arrays set apart to support individual applications—perform differently, communicate differently,
offer different levels of resiliency, and often require different backup and recovery processes,
appliances, or software. This in turn leads to a fragmented and overly-complex approach to data
protection, resulting in inefficiency, redundancy, increased risk, and added cost. The move towards
flash storage for managing the performance requirements of modern apps could bring even more
complexity to your environment.
60%
60%
of enterprise
storage space is
taken up by copies.
85%
2 Actifio blog article referencing IDC Whitepaper, New Research Identifies $44 Billion Dollar Copy Data Problem, June 2013
3 IDC paper, the copy data problem: an order of magnitude analysis 2013
85%
of storage spending
is dedicated to
managing those copies.3
3
Backup and recovery are more
important than ever before
Global business and always-on availability requirements mean that
enterprises can’t tolerate downtime. Add to that the cascading impact of
failure in a virtual world, where a single hardware failure can take down
multiple virtual servers and applications, and the risk to your business,
along with the operational costs of managing that risk, can
be staggering.
If you’re like a lot of enterprises, you end up spending more on managing
and storing copies of data than on storing live production data. This
imbalance is unsustainable. It’s time to think differently about
data protection.
For every minute
that critical
systems are
unavailable,
your company
loses revenue.
Evaluating data protection
optimized for the future
Four key considerations
For the past three years, improving data backup and recovery has been the
most-frequently cited IT priority by enterprises and mid-market
organizations.4 If you’re like most businesses, you want to improve
efficiency and reduce the cost of data backup and recovery.
The future of primary storage is flash. Gartner predicts that by 2019, 20% of
all high-end storage arrays will be flash arrays. This raises an important
question: “How do you solve today's issues while making sure that your
investments will support the technology your datacenters will use in the
future? As you shop for data-protection solutions, there are four important
considerations to keep in mind:
1. Protection
3. Efficiency
2. Convergence
4. Simplicity
4. 5ESG Research Report, 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2014
Gartner predicts
that by 2019, 20%
of all high-end
storage arrays
will be flash
arrays.
4
Consideration #1
Provide full protection
Snapshots and protection
In your high-availability virtual environment, snapshots are your first line of defense against data
loss. While snapshots provide a degree of protection (the ability to roll your VM back to a previous
point in time), snapshots alone fall short; if the storage array goes down, so do your snapshots. To
be fully protected, you must replicate or copy your snapshots to secondary storage, which might
sound easier than it actually is.
Most environments have primary arrays and secondary storage appliances based on different
architectures, with no native data movement between them. Virtual machine protection can be
completed with conventional backup software, but these solutions can be expensive to buy and
complex to manage. Backup applications are resource intensive and can impact the performance
of the production servers they protect.. To complicate things further, you probably have multiple
versions of this scenario supporting the various primary and secondary storage architectures
you’ve accumulated over time.
The same holds true for data recovery: Your data is not truly protected unless it is easily recovered.
The demands of high-volume transactional and digital business for aggressive Recovery Point
(RPO) and Recovery Time (RTO) Objectives place an additional burden on your infrastructure—a
burden that’s difficult to meet if storage systems don’t communicate natively, or require additional
resources and complex manual interventions to recover data.
Full protection is not just about storage architecture and backup/recovery processes, it's also about
scale and performance. The portfolio of backup appliances should be fully compatible and scale
from the low petabyte level with multiple nodes to meet the needs of the most demanding
enterprises. Performance must be scalable and align with RPOs and RTOs.
5
Consideration #2
Seek converged solutions
Why convergence matters
Instead of a patchwork architecture, what if
all your storage solutions were designed to
work together as one, taking advantage of
the same storage architecture at all layers of
the environment? That’s what converged
storage does by breaking the barriers
between storage silos and removing the
unnecessary complexity of managing
different storage types. Converged solutions
have the flexibility to fit into whatever
network ecosystem you have.
Flash-integrated flat
backup provides the
technology to meet the most
demanding RPO and RTO
requirements at significantly
lower cost.
Benefits of convergence include:
Resource
pooling
Centralized
management
Better capacity
utilization
Reduced
datacenter costs
6
You’re likely familiar with the concept of IT
convergence, bringing together multiple
components and platforms to create a single,
optimized environment.
What you may not have considered are the potential
benefits of convergence in reducing the complexity,
risk, and cost of your data-protection strategy.
True data protection requires an understanding of
how all of the pieces in your storage environment fit
together. In a converged storage environment, the
pieces complement one another, from primary
storage to secondary and archive storage, to the
control processes that bring these pools together.
Snapshot management
and snapshot backup
should be simple, efficient,
and reliable.
A converged data-protection strategy is
characterized by:
Simplicity
Breaking down barriers between different storage devices and architectures
Efficiency
Providing a single point of integration and control from the primary
application to backup and recovery
Performance
Enabling data to flow directly from primary to secondary storage without
bottlenecks caused by media servers and backup applications
7
Consideration #3
Look for efficiency
Leverage converged storage to remove
layers of complexity
Converged storage supports the concept of federation, or
automation between storage devices to enable seamless
data movement between those devices.
Primary and secondary
storage shouldn’t need
complicated and expensive
software-based processes
to communicate.
Converged storage applies federation to streamline the
process of moving data from primary storage to your
protection environment, allowing for native data movement
between primary and backup storage domains. Data
protection becomes a function of storage, eliminating the
need for additional backup infrastructures (media servers) and management (third-party backup
applications). This consolidation makes backups easier to manage, faster to complete, and less intrusive
on application processing.
Removing the complexity leaves you with a “flat-backup” process that can provide fully-automated
protection of your primary storage arrays managed directly from your hypervisor or application interface.
Data moves natively from primary storage to backup as scheduled by the business application owner,
without the need for media servers or backup software. The benefits of a converged, flat backup solution
should be immediately evident:
Fast
Cost Effective
Deliver on SLAs with consistent,
nondisruptive backup and recovery
Significantly reduce the cost
associated with traditional
backup approaches
Reliable
Provide applications the
availability of snapshots and
the protection of backup
Simple
Empower hypervisors and application
owners to control backup and
recovery directly from their preferred
native interfaces
8
Consideration #4
Demand simplicity
Look for ease-of-use and integration capabilities
A backup and recovery solution should not require an
advanced engineering degree to operate. The solution
should be managed directly by your application or
database administrator without the need for additional
servers, software, or layers of management. This makes it
far more efficient and cost effective to operate.
In a VMware environment, your VMware administrators
should be able to create, schedule, manage, and recover
using application-consistent, nondisruptive, time- and
space-efficient snapshots of your VMs, VMDKs, and data
stores from within VMware vCenter. Similar capabilities
should be available for Microsoft Hyper-V and other
virtual environments.
Converged storage
offers fully automated
protection of primary
storage arrays, managed
directly from the
hypervisor or application
interface.
You should also look for a programmable interface via a RESTful API Software Development Kit
(SDK). This will enable you to create your own plug-ins to facilitate management of
application-consistent snapshots and backups to the application or database of your choice.
9
The bottom line
Protect your most valuable assets
True data protection requires storage solutions
that are designed to work together as one.
Converged storage removes the complexity of
managing different storage types. It offers a
solution that can help you protect all of your
primary data, retain it for the long term, and derive
business value from it. The right solution will:
Reduce cost and complexity, and break
down barriers between storage silos
Enable seamless data movement
between storage devices
The right backup and recovery
solution should be managed
directly by your application or
database administrator without
the need for additional servers,
software, or layers of management,
making it efficient and
cost-effective to operate.
Improve efficiency by providing a single
point of integration and control
Deliver optimal performance and scale to the petabyte level
Enhance reliability by providing applications with the
availability of snapshots and the protection of backup
Support aggressive RPOs and RTOs without placing an
additional burden on infrastructure
Allow seamless integration of new storage today while
providing investment protection for the future
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage/bura
© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The
only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such
products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be
liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA6-3568ENW, July 2016