Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

As per SEPATON, data protection is getting more and more complicated for large enterprises with the complexity growing exponentially every year. In order to stay ahead of the explosion in data volume from inside and outside the corporate data center, Storage administrators are adopting new technologies to address the data protection challenges by leveraging advanced deduplication, disk-based backup solutions, and 10 Gb Ethernet network protocol.

In a press release, Dennis Rolland, director of advanced technology for the office of the CTO at SEPATON, said, “Many enterprises have multiple backup application environments, dozens of discrete backup targets several networking protocols, and a variety of disaster protection technologies to manage. Without careful planning, the benefits of new technologies can be offset quickly by the cost and risk of dramatically increased complexity.”

Rolland also added that the key factors governing the data protection complexity included Data center sprawl, Multi-protocol choices, and Cloud Computing and Data Center Consolidation. To improve backup and restore time, many data centers introduce disk-based backup solutions however these systems can quickly proliferate leading to ‘data center sprawl’ in the absence of grid scalability, enterprise-class deduplication and massive single-system capacity. Due to the need for individual management, deduplication and tuning of system, the entire system needs to be restructured so as to improve performance, capacity and efficiency.

By leveraging10 Gigabit Ethernet network and NetBackup application with OST, enterprise data centers manage to improve performance however the cost and complexity increases simultaneously. To back down on these two factors, data center managers make use of a phased approach that takes advantage of storage pooling on a single system, thus enabling ‘best of breed’ technology adoption with reduced complexity.

To consolidate and streamline data centers, large companies moving towards private cloud models need to implement a powerful data protection environment that allows proper allocation of performance and capacity as per the need of business unit without being restricted by physical hardware limitations. In a secure multi-tenancy model, usage and project capacity also need to be tracked on a business-unit level, and the companies also require an option to create another tier of data protection in a public cloud.

Rolland concluded that although increased complexity will drive purchasing decisions in 2011, it will also lead to increased cost with more pressure for enterprise-class data protection.